


Such a Lovely Place

by luulapants



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Aromantic Malia Tate, Background Relationships, Canon Divergence - Season 5, Dreams, Ensemble Cast, F/F, F/M, Ghosts, Happy Ending, Horror, Imprisonment, M/M, Mind Control, Minor Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Minor Derek Hale/Jordan Parrish, Minor Ethan/Jackson Whittemore, Minor Liam Dunbar/Hayden Romero, Minor Malia Tate/Tracy Stewart, Minor Scott McCall/Kira Yukimura, Mystery, Oral Sex, POV Multiple, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Psychological Horror, Restraints, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 44,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26671681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luulapants/pseuds/luulapants
Summary: Stiles and Peter meet the pack at a hotel where things aren't quite right. They can't remember when or how they got here. They don't ask questions, though. They don't ask how the waiters know their food orders without asking. They don't ask why the hedge maze outside has no end. They especially don't ask why Theo Raeken, who no one has seen since he left Beacon Hills nearly a decade ago, is there or why he seems so terrified.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 93
Kudos: 102





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I will post minor trigger warnings in the end notes rather than add to the inevitable wall o' tags. If you don't want spoilers or are concerned that I might not tag for your triggers, you can always send me an ask on Tumblr (luulapants.tumblr.com) or email faceclaimdatabaselady@gmail.com and ask if the fic contains your trigger.

Dawn glowed through the frosted windows, casting shadows and rainbows against the opposite wall. Stiles had never been one to wake with the sun, but he didn’t think he had ever slept so well in a bed that wasn’t his own. The mattress cradled him like it wanted to keep him forever. The air had gone cool overnight, leaving him quite comfortable snuggled down beneath his blankets. And, despite the thin appearance of the walls, his room had stayed remarkably silent, not even early morning birdsong making its way in.

Stiles rolled out of bed with a yawn and peeked through the curtains on the courtyard-facing side. The sun had not yet risen high enough to peek over the roof of the hotel, leaving the balcony and the green space below still in shadow. He didn’t see any other guests yet, no staff.

He took his time in the shower, then stepped back into his room in a towel. The boxers he’d slept in were balled up on the end of the bed. The clothes he’d worn the day before, a t-shirt and jeans, were in a heap on the floor. Stiles glanced around the room, frowning. No luggage. A wardrobe stood against the wall next to the door to his room, so he went to open it.

Just as his hand touched the knob, a knock sounded at the door.

“Laundry service!” a woman’s voice called.

Stiles checked the towel around his waist, then opened the door.

The maid was around his age, her black hair pulled back into a braid and wide, tan face taut with a bright smile. Her name tag said ‘Rose.’ She glanced at the tag on the white bag on top of her cart. “For… Stilinski?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he agreed. “Thanks.”

She passed the bag over, and he watched as she moved down to the next room, knocking and calling, “Laundry service!” As the other door opened, Stiles saw Peter in a similar state of undress, just a glimpse of tanned shoulders and chest hair before he flushed and pulled his own door closed.

No way. Stiles was twenty-seven years old, and he was _not_ starting that high school shit again.

He turned his attention to the laundry bag. At first, he thought maybe there had been a mix-up, and he’d gotten someone else’s bag by mistake. He pulled out a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with little pineapples printed on it, turning it over in his hands. The longer he looked at it, the more familiar it felt.

Yeah, this was definitely his.

Stiles put it on with a gray tank top underneath and black shorts. When he looked in the mirror on the wall, it took a second to recognize himself.

“It’s vacation,” Stiles reasoned with his reflection. “This is Vacation Stiles.” He shot finger guns at the reflection, then headed out onto the balcony.

The sun had risen high enough that the western side of the second floor balcony was lit, but the courtyard below stayed dark. The hotel had started to wake, though. A gardener, an older man with dark skin and a long, graying beard, stood beside the pool, watering the flowers. Theo was walking by the pool, sporting his own vacation-chic wardrobe, heading toward the lobby and, most likely, the bar. Tracy and Josh were coming down the stairs from the third floor.

Peter’s door opened, and Stiles turned. He barked a laugh. “What are you _wearing_?” he asked.

Peter glanced down at his white linen shirt, which gaped open nearly to his waist, where he had tucked it into well-fitted gray slacks. “What?” he asked, sounding offended. “This is a nice shirt.”

“It’s like your usual v-neck fashion on steroids,” Stiles insisted. “You look like you belong on the cover of a romance novel.”

“If that’s your way of telling me I look sexy, I’ll take it.” Peter lifted his nose imperiously as he brushed past Stiles toward the stairs.

Rolling his eyes, Stiles hurried after. “You know, I take it back,” he said. “It’s a good fit. It makes your ego look absolutely enormous.”

A wrought iron spiral staircase led from the second floor balcony down to the courtyard. Peter stopped about halfway down and looked up at Stiles. “Yes, and the pineapple shirt makes you look...” He trailed off, squinting and wrinkling his nose. He sighed and shook his head. “No. I’ve got nothing.” He continued on his way.

“What, no witty insults?” Stiles pestered.

“Nothing that isn’t already implied by that monstrosity. I do so hate to be redundant.”

As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Stiles jogged a couple of steps to walk side-by-side with Peter, winding past the stout, wide-branched hornbeam in the center of the yard. “You’re a dick.”

“And you’re the world’s most talkative piña colada.”

“You’re right,” Stiles shot back. “You have no witty insults. That was terrible.” He held out the edge of the shirt toward Peter. “For the record, there are only piñas on this shirt.”

“The colada is your pasty whiteness,” Peter explained. “I hope you’re planning to get a tan on this vacation?”

“Mmm, yeah, I do love me some skin cancer.”

They stepped through the archway into the pristine, marble tiled lobby. It had an almost completely different feel in the pale early morning light. The windows surrounding the entryway extended up two stories, and balconies overlooked the lobby on either side. The front desk phone rang, and the attendant answered with a chipper, “Hornbeam Hotel. How can I help you?”

A seating area of red velvet couches occupied the middle of the lobby. A lone woman, gray-haired in a lilac sundress, sat on one. One of her eye sockets was scarred over, a jagged red line crossing it from her hairline to her nose. With the other, she stared through the archways into the courtyard, her face pinched in a despair that Stiles had trouble looking on.

He and Peter hurried past into the bar.

Tracy and Josh had taken a small table close to the door. Theo sat at the bar, talking to the bartender over what Stiles suspected was a screwdriver, not plain orange juice. On the other end of the room, Malia and Hayden sat at one of the longer tables, breakfast already in front of them. Malia waved them over.

“How’d you sleep?” Hayden asked.

“Fantastic,” Stiles answered as he took the chair next to her. “I think my bed is made of actual clouds.”

Peter sat across from him. “I haven’t slept that well in years,” he agreed.

“I know,” Hayden agreed. “This place is amazing. Just wait until you try the food.”

Malia gave an enthusiastic nod, her mouth full of pancakes.

As if on cue, a sandy-haired waiter came out and set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of Peter.

Stiles blinked, startled. “Did you order?” he asked.

Peter frowned at the plate.

The waiter stood still beside them, a second plate held high.

“Yes,” Peter said after a moment. Then, with a bit of sass, “Obviously.”

The waiter set the second plate in front of Stiles: a big, beautiful Belgian waffle covered in blueberries and powdered sugar. “Thanks,” he told the waiter, then, reading his nametag, “Jerome.”

Jerome gave them a wide, toothy smile. “I’ll get the drinks out in a jiff,” he assured them. “Two coffees, one with cream and sugar?” Peter opened his mouth to speak, but Jerome cut him off before he could, pointing at him. “And pineapple juice.” Jerome winked at them. “Coming right up.” He turned and headed back for the kitchen.

Scott and Kira came in then, and Stiles’s face lit up. “Here’s a man that understands vacation fashion!” he declared. Scott looked down at his button-up shirt, bright yellow with dolphin print.

“Not looking too bad yourself,” Scott declared as he dropped into the seat beside Peter.

“You’re both abominations,” Peter informed them as he bit into a piece of bacon.

Kira wore a truly eye-gouging lime green romper, which clashed terribly with her turquoise necklace. She took the last empty seat, next to Scott and across from Malia. “I think it’s fun,” she insisted.

No sooner had her butt hit the chair than their waiter reappeared with a tray. “Coffees,” he said as he set them down in front of Stiles, Peter, and Kira. “Pineapple juice for Mr. Hale, and apple for Mr. McCall. And breakfast for the happy couple.” Eggs and hash browns for Scott, granola yogurt with a bowl of fruit for Kira.

“Thanks, Jerome,” Kira said, flashing him a sunny smile.

“Should we pull up another chair for Liam?” Stiles asked as the waiter left.

Hayden shook her head. “He sleeps in almost until lunch usually. What are you up to today?”

Stiles frowned, realizing that he hadn’t really thought about it, that he honestly couldn’t think of much. “I guess I’ll probably hang out by the pool. Why, what about you all?”

Scott brushed his hand over the back of Kira’s as he went for his fork. “I think we’re going to take a walk through the gardens this afternoon. You should come if you’re free. They’re really amazing.”

“What else is there to do around here?” Peter asked, a perfectly innocent sounding question. The entire bar went suddenly quiet, though. Scott, Kira, Hayden, and Malia all turned to look at Peter like he’d just let out a particularly unseemly burp. Peter looked around them, then picked up another piece of bacon. “I would love to see the gardens,” he said.

“Well, I’m getting some sun by the pool today,” Hayden declared. “There’s a lounge chair out there with my name on it.”

* * *

  
  


_Malia stared at her phone, the unknown number flashing on the screen. She considered letting it go to voicemail, then picked it up. “Yeah,” she said._

“ _It’s Theo. Don’t hang up.”_

_She hung up._

_The phone rang again, the same number. Heaving a sigh, she picked up again. “What?” she snapped._

“ _Are you still looking for your birth mother?”_

_She looked glared through her windshield at the sun-caked expanse of desert before her. Even the cacti looked like they were wilting in this heat. Malia wiped at the sweat on her brow. “What’s it to you?”_

“ _I think I have a lead on her,” Theo said. “There’s this hotel.”_

_Malia turned to glance out the driver’s side window and saw the regal, gray stone hotel rising over the hedges that surrounded it. The walkway seemed a mile long, but in two steps, she had arrived at the massive stone archway that parted the hedges. A wrought iron gate, three times her height, swung slowly outward to let her in._

_Her foot passed through the gate and landed on the marble floor of the lobby, which rose two stories around her with ornate wood paneling and textured red wallpaper between. Malia spun around, disoriented. She ended up facing a marble-topped window, framed with etched glass. The attendant, a bald-headed man with a reddish-brown complexion, smiled at her._

“ _Welcome to the Cedar Springs Hotel,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”_

* * *

  
  


Scott couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a real, honest-to-god vacation. Probably when he was in college – spring or winter break. He had forgotten how nice it felt, having nowhere to be, nothing to do. Even their plans to go walk through the garden felt nonessential. It was easy to simply roll over and yawn, face smashed half into the pillow, “You go. I think I’m going to nap a little longer.”

Kira bent down and kissed the corner of his mouth, stroking his hair back from his face. Scott peeked one eye open and saw her face, warm and affectionate.

“Love you,” he murmured.

“Love you, too. Have a good nap.” She kissed him again, and then he listened as she shuffled about until, finally, the door to their room opened and closed with a quiet ‘click.’

“ _Scott?” Malia said, her voice garbled through a bad connection. “Scott, can you hear me?”_

“ _I can hear you,” he said, raising his voice. “What’s wrong?”_

“ _Scott, I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble. You have to get out here.”_

“ _Where are you?”_

A thud sounded against the wall, waking him.

Scott opened his eyes and frowned. These rooms were nearly silent, even to his ears. He hadn’t heard anything from neighboring rooms before.

Another thud.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and stared at the wall. He couldn’t picture what would be on the other side of it. Malia’s room shared a wall with their bathroom on the other side, Theo’s on the other side of hers. The rest were in separate rooms on the second floor.

Scott pulled his clothes back on and, still barefoot, opened the door. He stared at the numbers on it, carved deep into the wood and painted in gold: _104_. He stepped out into the courtyard, just able to see flashes of movement by the pool through the tall ferns that grew up around it. He looked to his right toward Malia’s and Theo’s rooms. _103, 102_. Suddenly, he felt like someone was watching him, from behind or maybe below. Like there was something just out of the edge of his vision…

A knife flew past, mere inches from his nose. Scott leaned back, his heart hammering as he followed the movement of the knife where it had embedded in a door he hadn’t noticed before. It was tucked away in the corner of the courtyard, just behind the secluded hot tub and almost hidden by overgrown rose bushes. Just above the knife, faded gold numbers read, _105_.

He turned back in the direction that the knife had come from. There, on the bench in front of the tall, spear-shaped arbor vitae, sat a hooded figure. A pale nose just barely poked out from beneath the black fabric.

“Did you just throw that?” he asked.

A hand lifted and pushed the hood back, revealing long brown waves of hair. She peeked from beneath it, that same dimple-sweet smile he knew so well.

Allison.

She lifted a finger to her lips, shoulders shaking in laughter as she shushed him.

Scott took a step closer. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

She got to her feet. “Come on,” she told him. “We can’t talk here.” She motioned toward 105, and wrapped her fingers around his wrist, unmistakably firm. Real.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Scott said, feeling dazed.

Allison nudged him around the hot tub, toward the door. “Go on,” she said, “It’s unlocked.”

He had to step through the rose bushes to get to it, their thorns catching on his shorts and drawing specks of blood to the surface on his arms and legs. Just as she had said, though, the door opened easily. Inside, he found a room quite similar to his own, though a bit outdated. Gold foil wallpaper adorned the walls. It smelled faintly of cigarettes. An ornate glass lamp hung from the ceiling, and in place of the frosted windows in the rest of the room, this one was stained glass.

Lying in the center of the large bed, with its red silk comforter, was Allison. Only now, she didn’t have the cape on, just a white floral skirt and a pink blouse.

Scott turned back toward the door, confused, then back to her. “How did you –”

She pushed up onto her knees and began unbuttoning her blouse, eyes fixed on him. “Shut the door, Scott,” she said. “I missed you.”

* * *

  
  


“Oh, I think my favorite part is up ahead,” Kira said, her steps quickening as she led them through the towering hedge rows. Peter had never spent much time with Kira, before or after her desert sabbatical. The little time they had spent together was mostly of the life-or-death variety. He found her surprisingly pleasant in less dire circumstances. Bubbly, but not annoyingly so.

The shadowed pathway opened into another wide open garden space, this one with flat stepping stones leading over carefully raked sand. A wooden bridge crossed a pond to a small pagoda framed by cherry blossom trees. Peter didn’t confess to know much about Eastern landscaping, but he thought this garden was rather tastefully done.

"It reminds me of this old temple my mom and I went to in Japan," Kira explained, "right after I got back."

Peter followed Kira and Stiles onto the bridge. Glancing down, he saw huge koi fish swimming and couldn’t help but wonder how long it took the groundskeepers to get all this way through the hedge maze to tend to these gardens. Surely, someone was coming out to feed the fish.

“This is so cool,” Stiles said, moving past her to inspect the pagoda. “I love how there’s, like, a different theme to each garden.” He turned, taking in the full picture of the space with that keen, observant look of his. In the warm sunlight, his brown eyes glowed almost amber. “I like this one better than the weird retro one.”

Peter forced himself to look away from Stiles, turning back to Kira. “Are we near the end?” he asked.

She stood beneath one of the cherry blossom trees, stretching up to pluck a few blossoms. She tucked them behind her ear. “What do you mean?”

Peter glanced around them. The gardens within the maze were all fairly spacious, which only added to the feeling of disorientation. He couldn’t even begin to visualize where they were on the grounds. “I mean the maze. Where does it come out at the end?”

Stiles glanced between the two of them, brow furrowed. “The end of the maze?” he asked.

Kira laughed. “It’s a maze, Peter,” she said. “Why would it end? We’ll just go back the way we came.”

Right. Peter had to shake his head, feeling like the twists and turns of the maze had sunk into his brain. Right, why would a maze end? “How far into it have you gone?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, turning to look at the next opening. “A while farther. It just keeps going.”

A dragonfly landed on the surface of the pond below him. Peter watched as a koi fish swam up and opened its massive maw, lines of razor sharp teeth within. They closed around the dragonfly, whole.

* * *

  
  


“Shit, my earring fell off,” Hayden said, hanging onto the edge of the pool with her fingers clasped around her earlobe.

Liam swam over to her side, treading water. “Do you know when?”

She shook her head. “I know I had them on when I came out here, but it could be anywhere in the pool.” She turned to look over the expanse of blue. “Shit,” she repeated.

“I’ll dive down, see if I can find it,” Liam volunteered.

“I can do it,” she insisted.

Liam snorted and swam forward close enough to steal a kiss. “No offense? But you’re a terrible swimmer. I’ll go look.”

Pushing off the side of the pool, Liam sucked in a breath and went under. The chlorine stung at his eyes when he opened them, but only for a second. Then he was diving down, down to the bottom. The water at the top of the pool glowed bright cerulean in the sunlight, but it got darker the farther he went. Liam could have sworn he could see the bottom of the pool from the surface, but as he descended into the black, he found himself reaching out and finding nothing below.

In a moment of sudden panic, he realized that he didn’t even know if he _was_ swimming downward anymore, disoriented in the dark and the weightlessness of the water.

Which way was down?

Which way was up?

Liam’s lungs burned as he twisted around, seeking out a glimpse of the light from above and finding nothing but black on all sides. If only he could see in the dark. If only, if only.

A voice inside of himself, which seemed to speak directly from the ache in his lungs, said, _You can. Remember? You can see in the dark._

Liam closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they shone gold, spilling light into the murky water. There, just ahead of him, something glinted and reflected in the light of his eyes. A small diamond earring. His fingers closed around it, and just as quickly, he slammed his foot against the bottom of the pool, sending himself rocketing upward.

When he broke the surface, he was shivering, gasping for air.

“You were under a long time,” Hayden said.

“I found it,” Liam gasped. He held the earring out in his hand, eyes fixed on it as he swam toward her.

Hayden didn’t say anything. When he looked up, he saw that she had big, gold hoop earrings in both ears. “What’s that?” she asked.

A door slammed on the other side of the courtyard. Liam hauled himself up over the side of the pool, padding barefoot across the mossy flagstones. Two guests, the one-eyed woman and a younger black-haired woman, were playing chess on the stone table on the other side of the path from the pool. He wound his way around the old, twisted cypress tree in the center of the courtyard.

Scott stood outside the door to his room, his back to Liam.

“Scott?” Liam asked, sensing… something. Something wrong. “Scott, what’s up?”

It took a moment, but Scott turned to face him. He had bruises on his neck – hickies and bite marks – and half of the buttons on his shirt were missing. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

Laughter rang out through the courtyard behind Liam, from the direction of the door to the gardens. He heard Kira’s voice, bright and bubbly as it echoed against the stone walls. His eyes widened as he stared at Scott. “You didn’t,” he gasped, because he had never pegged Scott as the cheating type.

“I didn’t _what_?” Scott asked, holding his arms out wide.

“Kira’s going to flip out,” Liam told him. “She’s gonna – god, she’s going to be so _sad_ , Scott!”

“What? Why?” Scott looked over his shoulder in the direction of her voice, brow knitting in concern.

Liam didn’t get a chance to explain to Scott that he looked like he had been _mauled_ before Kira, Stiles, and Peter stepped around the cypress.

“Scott!” Kira greeted. “Did you have a nice –” Her voice died as she took in the state of him, face crumpling at once in despair and disbelief. “Scott,” she whispered.

“ _What_?” Scott demanded. “What is everyone freaking out about?”

“Dude...” Stiles murmured, rubbing at the back of his neck. He shook his head.

“Was it Malia?” Kira asked. “I know you… but I thought...” Her lower lip trembled. She spun on her heel and took off toward the lobby.

“What the hell is going on?” Scott asked.

Stiles strode up close to him, speaking low but still loud enough that Liam could hear. “Dude, what the fuck is the matter with you? Go look in the mirror.”

* * *

  
  


Kira’s new room was on the second floor, 206. She climbed the wrought iron stairs to the balcony. Liam and Hayden were in 201 and 202, to the left of the staircase. Stiles and Peter were in 204 and 205, nestled in the opposite corner. She walked around to the opposite side of the balcony and found her door, the numbers carved and neatly painted in gold.

“Kira!” a voice called from across the courtyard.

She turned and saw Theo on the balcony opposite, by the stairs. She stood, waiting, as he rushed around to her side. They hadn’t talked much since she got here, and she honestly wasn’t looking to pick up the habit.

“What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing at the door.

Kira lifted her chin to keep from cowering in her own misery. She had already had a near meltdown in the lobby of the hotel. The last thing she needed to add to this shitty day was crying in front of Theo Raeken. “I got a new room,” she said. “Not that it’s your business.”

“Why?” he urged. “You don’t want to get your own room. You and Scott, you guys are great together.”

She gaped at him, not sure where the hell he got off saying something like that. She hadn’t seen Theo since high school, since he had been cooking up his little chimera pack with the Dread Doctors all those years ago. By the time she got back from her time with the skinwalkers, he had been long gone. “It’s _really_ none of your business,” Kira repeated, more firmly this time.

“You can’t just…” Theo looked oddly panicked as he looked down over the balcony at room 104, her old room. “Whatever’s wrong, whatever happened between you two, you should try to work it out.”

“Thanks for the advice,” she said, not bothering to sound at all grateful. “Now if you don’t mind?” Kira tipped her head toward the door, then unlocked it and slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her.

The room looked a little smaller than the room she had shared with Scott, about the same length, but shallower. It might have at least offered a view of the gardens from above, but all of the windows facing the outside of the hotel were frosted with little flower details etched into the glass.

“Silver linings, Kira,” she murmured to herself. She looked at the antiquated old television in the corner, the type built into a wooden box. That looked about the same as their other one, too. “No fighting over the TV channels,” she noted. Her gaze wandered to the bed. “No listening to him snore.”

No cuddling, either.

Kira sat on the end of the bed, then fell backward onto it with a huff. Her eyes slid shut.

“ _Where the hell is this place?” she asked. The cradle of the mountains had started giving way to looser rocks and red mud, the trees growing sparser and sparser as they went on. Around another curve, the rest of the mountain pass opened before them. Below, the flat, blinding glare of the desert gaped up at them, barren and nearly white._

_Scott frowned and tightened his grip on the wheel. “She didn’t say, just gave the coordinates.”_

“ _And she wouldn’t tell you what this was about either,” Kira sighed. The whole thing felt wrong, off. Scott had originally wanted to go by himself. As much as she trusted Scott, letting him charge off alone to god-knows-where to save his ex-girlfriend from an unknown danger really hadn’t sounded like the best plan of action._

“ _She wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t something really bad,” Scott said._

_Kira gazed warily into the abyss of desert. It seemed to rush at her, like it had fingers that could grasp her by the ankles, pull her down and keep her. She touched her turquoise necklace, fingers trailing over the beads down to the claws that hung from it._

“ _Are you okay?” Scott asked. “Is this… you know, does it make you think about the skinwalkers?”_

“ _I’m fine,” she assured him, and the question settled her a bit. Maybe that was the bad feeling. Maybe nothing but unhappy memories. She glanced at Scott’s phone. “The GPS says we won’t get there until ten. Do you think we should stop to stay the night somewhere, find her in the morning?”_

_Scott didn’t answer. When she looked up at him, Nascha, the skinwalker, sat in his place. Her hair was wild, face streaked with dust and white paint. Her voice came out in a rasp. “Where are you going?” she demanded. “Little fox, where are you going?”_

_Kira flinched back, closing her eyes and pressing herself against the door of the car. When she opened her eyes again, it was the hotel desk attendant behind the wheel, wearing his usual maroon suit and immovable smile. “Welcome to the Cedar Springs Hotel,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”_

* * *

  
  


Malia didn’t really understand the drama that had gone down the day before. Hell, she had been napping for most of it. But her friends were all looking at her like she’d drowned someone’s cat. Most of them were already there when she walked into the bar for breakfast: Peter, Scott, and Stiles at one table; Hayden and Kira at another. All of them stared at her like they were afraid she would try to sit with them.

If pressed, Malia would admit that she hadn’t exactly been the best pack mate _or_ friend in recent years. Her search for her mother had overtaken everything for a while. Then she met up with Braeden, tried her hand at bounty hunting, and that served as a decent outlet for her frustration. Maybe she couldn’t find Corinne, but she could find a whole lot of other scumbags.

It hadn’t exactly left her much time for trips home to Beacon Hills.

She went to the bar and sat next to Theo.

“You must have fucked up pretty bad,” he said, eyes fixed on his coffee as he stirred in some cream.

Malia shrugged, then motioned to the bartender. She had gray hair, a black patch over one eye, and her name tag read ‘Nora.’ Malia needed something more than orange juice this morning, and Nora didn’t question it. She set a mug of coffee in front of her, then tipped some whiskey into it.

Theo studied her curiously, slouched forward against the bar. He took a sip. “How’d you do it, Malia? Do you even remember?”

If she didn’t know what the hell had gone on with her friends, she really had no goddamn clue what Theo Raeken was on about. She narrowed her eyes at him in suspicion.

He laughed. “No, of course you don’t.” Theo set his coffee aside and dug a spoon into his oatmeal. “Fine, fine. Let me just ask you one thing, then.” He slipped the spoon into his mouth, licked it clean. He smirked at her. “Why can’t you talk?”

What?

Malia opened her mouth to respond, but no sound came out, like she was trying to shake something loose from an empty bag. Panic clutched at her chest as she tried again to make a sound.

“Sausage skillet for you, Miss Tate,” the bartender said as she set a plate down in front of her. “Hash browns extra crispy, just like you said.”

The plate looked perfect, just what she’d asked for. She smiled at Nora, then dug in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: Liam has a near-drowning panic. Scott has a sexual encounter (not explicitly described) with an unknown entity that he believes to be Allison, and then seems to have no recollection of it afterward. Could be seen as infidelity, since he is in a relationship with Kira.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theo gets aggressive with Liam. Stiles throws Scott a breakup party. Malia and Tracy share a day in the gardens.

“ _I’m just saying,” Liam insisted, putting himself in Scott’s path and walking backwards in front of him, “you don’t know what you’re walking into. It would be good to have backup!”_

“ _I have backup,” Scott said with a smirk. “Besides, you don’t actually want to go. You just want an excuse to not go to class.”_

_Liam clutched a hand to his heart, feigning offense. “Me? I would never –” He tripped over an untied shoelace, twisting around as he toppled backward, falling face-first onto…_

_...onto his bed, where he lay on top of a balled-up pillow, phone pressed to his ear. “It’s just not like him to not call, you know? They should have at least checked in by now.” His chest tightened in anxiety as he traced a claw over the bedspread._

“ _I mean, it’s possible they don’t have service wherever they are,” said the voice on the other end of the line, muffled and cutting in and out. “That far out in the desert, that’s totally possible. Don’t, like, just assume they’re dead or something, okay?”_

“ _I would know if Scott was dead,” Liam reminded him._

“ _Exactly,” he agreed. “Look, I won’t be able to get there for a couple weeks at least. Promise you won’t do anything crazy?”_

_Liam got up, walked to the door of his room. He stepped through it and into a marble-tiled lobby._

* * *

  
  


A soft knock sounded on Liam’s door, just barely cutting through the fog of sleep. He stared at the ornately carved crown molding around the light fixture and frowned. There were small figures in the wood that he hadn’t noticed before, too small to make out clearly. It looked like animals running, maybe.

Another knock.

With a groan, he got up and padded to the door in his boxers.

Hayden stood on the balcony in a pale yellow dress, a sun hat perched on her head. She lifted an eyebrow at him. “You’re _still_ sleeping?”

“I’m a growing boy,” he mumbled, rubbing at his face.

“You’re not,” she laughed, stepping in for a quick kiss. “You’re a fully-grown man-child.”

Liam gave her his dopiest, most endearing smile, the one she hated to love, and stepped back. “Come on in, I’ll get dressed.”

Hayden caught his hand and pulled him closer again. “I was actually just stopping by to tell you you’re on your own today,” she said, her smile fading. “I’m gonna spend the day with Kira, keep her mind off of things.”

Cringing, Liam leaned against the door frame. “How’s she doing?”

“Not great?” She sighed. “Mostly, I think she’s confused, you know. It’s just not...”

“It’s not like him,” Liam agreed. He leaned in and kissed the corner of Hayden’s mouth. “Try to have fun, I guess.”

“I’ll catch you later,” Hayden assured him, then turned in a swirl of skirts and headed for the stairs. Liam watched her go. He had never seen her wear anything like that before. It seemed a little old-fashioned, like a dress from an old photograph.

Just as she descended below his line of sight, a voice spoke from his other side, where the courtyard balcony met the doors to the balcony over the lobby. “You two look like you’re doing well.”

Liam turned and narrowed his eyes at Theo. “Why do you care?”

Theo shrugged, hands tucked in the pockets of his slacks as he ambled closer. “Just a friendly observation. I thought it was a little weird that you two didn’t get a room together. I thought maybe you had broken up at first.”

“Well, we didn’t,” Liam replied, defensive. He suddenly felt much more exposed than he had talking to Hayden. It wasn’t like he had anything to be ashamed of, but his boxers were pretty damn thin.

“So… why the separate rooms?” Theo asked. He laughed. “You guys have been together for, what, eight years? You haven’t moved in together yet?”

Liam crossed his arms over his chest, then uncrossed them. “We have our own rooms in our apartment, too. We like to have our own space, that’s all. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Theo stopped at the railing across from Liam’s door, leaning against it. “Sure, but on vacation, too? Aren’t you worried some of the other guests will think she’s available?”

“She’s not my property, Theo,” Liam snapped. “God, you’re still just as much of a creep as you were in high school, you know that?” When Theo said nothing, just kept staring at him, Liam added, “If you’re really that desperate to know, I stay up too late and she hogs the blankets. That’s seriously it.”

Lip curled in irritation, Theo turned and looked across the courtyard at Kira’s new room. She had taken 206, directly opposite Hayden’s and Liam’s rooms, 201 and 202. 207 hosted a bronze-skinned young woman who spent most of her days in the gardens, the one who had been playing chess the day before.

Deciding that he wasn’t awake enough to deal with Theo’s weirdness, Liam started to close the door. In a flash, Theo was in front of it, hand curled around the edge of the door to hold it open. “Did you call anyone else?” he asked.

“What?”

The fake-friendly nosiness from before had evaporated, leaving a venomous expression etched across Theo’s face. “You called Stilinski, right?” he demanded. “Who else did you call?”

“Stilin – Stiles is probably with Scott. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Before you got here!”

The words came out too loud, and Liam found himself flinching back. Something unpleasant churned in his gut, a coldness. “Fuck off, Theo,” he muttered.

Theo advanced into the room. “You can’t even fight me, can you?” he asked, a dark chuckle hiding under the words. He grabbed Liam by his shoulders and pushed him back until he hit the wardrobe, hard enough that the wood creaked in protest.

Liam tried to shove back, but Theo’s grip was strong, impossibly so. He didn’t even budge. “Fuck _off_ , Theo!” he snarled. He felt the familiar rage rising inside of him, all panic and bile.

“There it is!” Theo crowed. He shoved again, and the wardrobe knocked against the wall. “You gonna fight me, Liam!?” He laughed, mouth wide with his teeth bared. A hand came up and wrapped around Liam’s throat, squeezing just enough to send a thrill of panic through him. “Now, _who did you call?_ ”

The surge of anger billowed and snapped in a single moment, and Liam heard himself snarling like an animal, shoving Theo back and into the opposite wall.

Theo looked, of all things, hopeful. “Who else is coming?” he asked in a whisper.

Liam slammed a hand against the wall next to Theo’s head. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about!” Liam snapped. He shoved Theo toward the door. “Now get the hell out of my room!” Theo stumbled out, and Liam slammed the door after him. His heart thundered relentlessly in his chest.

His eyes slid from the door to the wall he’d shoved Theo against. The plaster was dented where Theo’s shoulders had connected. Just above that were five holes, where his hand had struck. Between one blink and the next, they were gone.

* * *

  
  


Stiles sat in the middle of Scott’s bed, legs crossed, picking at a loose thread on the rust-colored comforter. “Are you seriously not going to tell me?” he asked, trying and failing not to sound hurt. Because this wasn’t _about_ him, and Stiles was really working on not turning other people’s problems into ‘Stiles’s insecurities’ problems. A former psychologist working at the bureau had called him out on that over the winter.

Scott lay draped over the stiff-cornered love seat, feet dangling in Stiles’s direction. He had a bottle of gin resting on his chest, and actually seemed to be getting drunk. Maybe that was just the moping, though. “I told you,” Scott sighed. “I don’t even know how.”

“I’m your best friend,” Stiles pushed. “If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

“You won’t believe me,” Scott said, a bitter laugh reverberating through the room. “I don’t even believe me, really.”

“Try me.”

After a moment, Scott pulled his legs back onto the love seat. He sat up, looking at Stiles over the back rest. “I thought it was a dream,” he mumbled. “I mean, I… I still kind of think it was a dream.”

Stiles lifted an eyebrow. “Dreams don’t leave hickies, dude.”

“It was Allison,” Scott said.

Stiles opened his mouth to respond, but the words caught up with him before he could. He closed his mouth, tried to turn that sentence around in his head, fit it into a shape that made sense. “That’s not funny,” he finally replied.

“I’m not joking.”

“Scott, she’s – ”

“I know.”

Stiles had to look away from the earnest look on Scott’s face, squinting at the frosted glass window. “It’s been… it’s been almost a decade, man.”

“I _know_.”

He blew out a noisy breath. Stiles wanted to be able to tell Scott that he believed him, but some things just weren’t possible. And, in any case, whether or not it was possible didn’t change Scott’s situation. “Okay, well, you definitely can’t tell Kira _that_.”

“I know.” Scott took another swig of gin.

“I mean, right now she thinks you’re not over Malia and you went off and screwed her. Turning around and saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s my _other_ ex-girlfriend that I’m not over that I went and screwed,’ isn’t going to make the situation any better.”

Scott leaned on the back rest and glared at Stiles. “Is this you trying to help?”

“Believe it or not, yes.”

“Yeah, well, you suck at it.” There was a bit of heat in Scott’s tone, but Stiles couldn’t exactly blame him for that. As best friend interventions went, this was not one of the winners.

Stiles sighed and climbed to the foot of the bed, swinging his legs down onto the floor. “Are you just going to stay in here and drink? Is that the plan?”

“Pretty much.”

“Does that stuff taste any good?”

“It kind of tastes like I’m drinking a Christmas tree.” When Stiles gave a considering expression, Scott added, “So, no, not great.”

“Alright, here’s a plan,” Stiles declared. “I’m gonna go get Peter and have him pick out some good, snobby wines from the bar. If you’re gonna pretend to get drunk, at least it’ll taste a little better. Besides, maybe you’ll feel like less of a scumbag if you have him around for comparison.”

Scott frowned at his gin bottle for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Alright.” He set the gin on the side table. Stiles was halfway to the door when Scott called out, “Stiles?”

Stiles turned and saw his friend scrubbing at his eyes, like they had started to tear up.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Scott asked.

The question hit him straight in the gut, all the more painful for the response he knew he had to give.

“She’s dead, Scott.”

* * *

  
  


Most of the gardens were thickly furnished with foliage, ornamental trees, fish ponds, stone fountains. Each had its own personality to it, but most were stylized. Twenty-two gardens in, however, was one that looked wild, almost a tiny forest. Fruit and nut trees dominated the majority of it – not orderly lines of them like an orchard but a chaotic tangle of them, organic. At the edge of the trees, overgrown berry bushes competed for space, all of them sagging under the weight of their fruit. A thin dirt path wound through the trees, seemingly intent to go the least direct route possible.

Beside the path, about halfway in, was a fire pit with a stack of wood beside it. There wasn’t even a log to sit on, just soft, mossy earth. Despite the warmth of the day, Malia built herself a small fire and sat back to watch it.

She had spent a lot of time in the gardens since the blowup between Scott and Kira. She didn’t want to get anywhere near that drama, and no one seemed to know how to act around her anyway.

That was fine. Malia had been on her own for years now, roaming the god-forsaken desert states, chasing warrants. After leaving Beacon Hills to follow a lead on the Desert Wolf, telling Scott that she would only be ‘a week, maybe two,’ she had instead spent two months chasing shadows down to a trailer diner in Las Cruces. That was where Braeden found her.

Braeden hadn’t tried to tell her off of her fool’s errand, hadn’t even suggested outright that Malia make a career out of this obsessive hunting instinct. She just sat down across from her and said, “I’m on a bounty headed for Alamogordo. I could use some backup. Fifty-fifty split.”

They had stuck together for a little less than a year, punctuating days of stakeouts and foot chases with nights tangled together in motel sheets. They still worked jobs together occasionally, when one of them got into something really nasty. They still fell into bed together on occasion, too. But she and Braeden were both solitary hunters in their hearts. They liked the company of the chase.

A stick snapped, maybe fifteen feet away on the other side of the blackberry brambles. Malia didn’t get up, just lifted her gaze and watched as Tracy came around on the path.

Tracy stopped short. “Oh,” she said. For a moment, she looked like she might just turn around. Instead, she came over to the opposite side of the fire. “I didn’t know there was a fire pit here.” She chewed on her lip. “It’s nice,” she offered. “You mind if I sit?”

Malia lifted a careless shoulder and waved a hand in permission.

“I like this garden,” Tracy commented as she sat, fanning her blue dress out around her. “I mean… it’s not even really a garden, right? It’s beautiful, though.”

Deciding that a peace offering was in order, Malia reached into her pocket for a pear she had picked earlier and held it up in offering.

Tracy smiled and held her hands out. “Thanks.” She caught it easily and bit in at once, groaning as the juice slipped down her chin. “God, that’s good.”

Malia tracked a drip of pear juice down the pale lines of Tracy’s neck. She had been skinny, back in high school. Malia remembered how frail she had seemed, terrified and confused even as her body kept fighting, still half convinced that she was asleep. She was still slender now. Whatever Tracy had gotten into in the past decade, though, whatever drama Theo had dragged her into, she had firmed up, the lean lines going taut with muscle and wariness.

“You must have really screwed up, huh?” Tracy said, licking at her own wrist, and Malia fought to pay attention to her words and not the dart of a pink tongue against skin. Why had she thought a pear would be a good idea? “They’re treating you the way they treat me and Josh.” She tipped her head to the side, considering. “And Theo, I guess, but he likes to nose his way in anyway.” Leaning back on her free hand, Tracy kept at the pear, relentless, as she spoke. “But me and Josh, we might as well be lepers. We never got a chance to get in with you all back then. Not like Hayden.”

That dragged Malia’s attention away from the pear juice, a stab of guilt twisting in her gut.

“We didn’t know any better when Theo asked us to leave, you know?” Tracy mused. “And no one tried to stop us. Not like with Hayden.”

Malia ducked her head, but Tracy must have seen the shame on her face. She quickly added: “Hey, you were kids back then, too.” When Malia didn’t lift her head, Tracy insisted, “You were.” When Malia looked up, Tracy was sitting nearer to her, and it startled her that she hadn’t heard her coming closer. She held up the half-eaten pear with a soft smile. “You should try this. It’s really good.”

Hesitantly, Malia leaned forward and took a bite out of the uneaten half. The juice burst over her lips, trailing down her chin. Before she could lift a hand to wipe at it, though, Tracy’s hand was there instead, a thumb chasing the droplets from the line of her jaw back up to her lips.

“You’re a really good listener, you know?” Tracy murmured.

Malia leaned forward, and kissed her.

Tracy lay back on the soft, mossy earth. In the shade of the trees, the firelight played over her features, glinting in her eyes as she stared up at Malia, then pulled her down for another kiss.

* * *

  
  


“Okay,” Stiles slurred, leaning over the bar. “We have...” He raised a finger, then pressed it to the side of his nose, clumsy. “...one more request.”

Nora smiled at him, amused. “I think you’ve had enough,” she observed. “I’m pretty sure letting you walk away with a whole bottle of wine would be downright irresponsible.”

Stiles stumbled back a step, looking wounded. He splayed his hands against his chest. “S’not for me!” he insisted. He flung an arm out to the side, nearly smacking Theo in the side of the head as he pointed toward the door. “S’for my friends. They can drink...” He swayed a little. “...so much.”

Theo laughed bitterly into his whiskey. “And why is that?” he muttered.

Nora reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Fine. If you drop it, consider your to-go bar service cut off for the rest of your stay.”

Stiles pressed his hands together in front of his nose, then tipped them forward in a gesture of gratitude. “You are… the best. Angel.”

“Not the word I’d use,” Theo snorted, and Nora shot him a fierce look.

As he reached for the bottle, Stiles asked, “Is this the… the 2016? Peter was _very_ speci - specifisic. He’s always very specifisic. He’s a _snob_.”

“It’s the 2016,” Nora agreed.

Stiles gazed at the bottle, picturing the way the Peter would sip the wine, then smack his tongue, commenting, _“Ugh, this vintage is far too acidic,”_ or something equally obnoxious.

“God, why do I _like_ that?” Stiles complained.

Taking the bottle very carefully in both hands, Stiles headed out of the bar and into the lobby just as the front doors opened. He stopped, blinking in surprise. The doors swung shut, leaving Chris Argent and Jordan Parrish standing in the lobby. They both looked around themselves, mouths agape. Jordan’s eyes fell on Stiles, and he took a step closer.

Before he could speak, though, the attendant spoke up: “Welcome to the Hawthorn Hotel, gentlemen. We’ve been expecting you.”

Both of them seemed to settle at once. They walked to the counter.

Beside him, he heard the word, “ _Fuck_.” Looking over, Stiles saw that Theo had come to stand next to him. Maybe it was the booze, but Stiles thought he seemed scared. He spared Stiles a rather miserable look. “No chance you’re fucking the deputy, huh? Want him to bunk with you?”

“Huh?” Stiles asked, blinking in confusion. He decided to ignore Theo. That was usually the best course of action. He kept the wine hugged against his stomach as he ambled across the room. Both Chris and Jordan were busy disarming themselves, unstrapping guns and knives and setting them on the counter. Stiles clapped a hand onto Jordan’s shoulder. “Hey, m’glad you could make it,” he slurred. “You deserve a vacation, mm?”

Jordan looked confused. The attendant cut in, “Apologies. Mr. Stilinski, maybe you should let your friends finish checking in. Don’t you have someone waiting on that wine?”

Stiles looked down at the bottle, then back up at the attendant with his broad, polite smile and shiny bald head. “I do,” he agreed. He stepped back. “Catch ya ‘round, dudes!” he called to Chris and Jordan, then set out into the courtyard for Scott’s room, tucked behind the hawthorn tree.

* * *

  
  


Birds tittered in the trees overhead. Sprawled out on the soft earth, Malia watched them through hazy satisfaction. There was another of those light kitten licks between her legs, and she twitched, oversensitive. Reaching down, she nudged Tracy’s face up, tugged her closer.

Tracy pressed her lips to Malia’s stomach, just below her navel, then above it, then between her breasts, and finally against her lips. “That was perfect,” she murmured against Malia’s mouth. She settled onto the ground, curled up with her head pillowed on Malia’s shoulder. “You know, I think I had a little crush on you, back in high school. I didn’t realize at the time that’s what it was.”

Smirking in amusement, Malia pushed her fingers through Tracy’s hair. She wore it shorter now than she had back then, just above her shoulders. She let herself bask for long minutes in the endorphins and the mild, humid air. Finally, she sat up and reached for her clothes.

“No, stay,” Tracy goaded, tracing a finger down Malia’s spine.

As she tugged her sports bra back on, Malia glanced back at Tracy, then gave a meaningful look toward the fire, which had guttered out.

“We can make a new fire,” Tracy insisted. She sat up, making no move to dress. There were little hickies blossoming around her collarbone. “Let’s just stay out here.” She kissed Malia’s shoulder. “Who needs a hotel, hm? We can just camp out here forever.”

Malia tugged on her underwear, a bit of guilt starting to work its way under her skin. Tracy had a crush on her, or at least she used to. Now she thought this was going to turn into something more. It had never been that way for Malia though, not since she was a teenager, just listening to whatever people told her what she was _supposed_ to want out of a relationship. Truth was, she didn’t get the butterflies in her stomach that people talked about. She didn’t moon over people. Malia lusted, sure, but she felt satisfied with it the second her appetites were sated. With Stiles and Scott, it had been easy to mistake friendship for romance. With Braeden, it had never been more than rough fucks in motel rooms and a half-friendly working relationship.

When Malia stood up to pull her shorts on, Tracy caught her hand. She stayed sitting, knees against her bare chest as she stared up at Malia, wide-eyed. “Please stay,” she said, nearly a whisper. “I feel like something horrible is going to happen if you leave me.”

Curious, Malia dropped back to her knees, studying the fear on Tracy’s face. It reminded Malia of how she had looked when she was first turned by the Dread Doctors. Her face had gotten older since then, but the fear was the same.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Tracy explained, hushed. “I think something changed for me.”

Love, maybe, Malia thought. She saw how it consumed other people, made them feel like they weren’t enough on their own. If she stayed, it would only give Tracy more hope that this would go beyond a quick vacation fling. If she got up and left… well, it just seemed cruel to leave her here when she was so afraid.

A crack of thunder made the decision for her. Rain pelted its way through the canopy of the trees all at once, extinguishing the smoldering remains of the fire. Malia passed Tracy her clothes and got back to her feet. The second she had her shirt on, the rain was already sticking it to her skin. When she looked down at Tracy, though, she was pulling on her underwear sluggishly, dejected. Malia grabbed Tracy’s dress from off the ground and shoved it over head for her.

Tracy let Malia pull her to her feet. She didn’t put up a fight as Malia tugged her through the gardens, just clung tightly to her hand. She might have been crying a little, but it was hard to tell with the rain. By the time they reached the entrance to the hedge maze, the door into the hotel directly across from it, they were both soaked through.

“I can’t,” Tracy said, staring up at the building. Her lips curled back and trembled in dismay. She shook her head. “I can’t go in.”

Malia took a step toward the door, but Tracy hung onto her with both hands.

“Please, don’t leave me,” she begged.

She hadn’t signed up for this, for being needed so violently. Malia didn’t know what to do with it. She pulled her hand free and walked to the door of the hotel, which opened into a covered portion of the courtyard.

Behind her, she heard a shriek, almost inhuman.

Malia turned to look, but there was no one there.

Figuring she was already soaked, she crossed the open courtyard instead of going around under the balconies, only the narrow shade of the cypress tree offering reprieve from the deluge. Room 103 was tucked into the back corner of the courtyard, between Theo and Scott’s rooms and behind the spiral staircase that lead to the upper levels. The balcony above sheltered the door itself from the rain, but water ran down the iron beams of the staircase in streams, puddling on the moss-slick red paving bricks.

She fumbled with the lock for a moment, then slipped inside. The second the door closed behind her, the deafening roar of the rain cut off, leaving Malia in near silence. It was a nice room. Not too large, but big enough for a queen bed, a small table with two chairs, and a sitting area with a love seat and a TV. The TV was a relic, one of the old wooden box sets that sat on the ground. It didn’t even have a remote, just black plastic buttons next to the domed glass screen.

Malia stripped out of her shirt and took it straight into the bathroom, hanging it over the side of the claw-foot tub. The rest of her clothes followed, all of them clinging to the porcelain and dripping on the tile below.

Without bothering to get redressed, Malia flopped face-down onto her bed. She was probably getting the sheets wet, but couldn’t find it in her to care. She felt strange, a little restless. As she drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help but think that she’d forgotten something.

* * *

  
  


_Malia sat in a lounge chair beside the pool, the noon sun streaming down and glinting off the tiles. A gardener stood nearby, trimming the massive flowering shrubs that grew up next to the pool. He was a middle-aged man, dark-skinned with a salt-and-pepper beard. She had the odd feeling that he ought to be humming, maybe. Something besides silently and diligently focusing on his flowers._

“ _What kind of flowers are those?” she asked._

_He turned toward her and smiled. “Hydrangeas,” he said. He had an accent she didn’t recognize. “They’ll grow as big as trees if you don’t keep on top of them.” He said ‘dem’ instead of ‘them,’ and there was something fluid and easy about the cadence of his speech._

_Malia smiled. “I have a friend that’s a big gardening fanatic. Just a hobby, but she goes all out. She can tell you what kind of soil you need, fertilizer and all that.”_

“ _You have a lot of friends?” he asked, which wasn’t the question she was expecting._

_She frowned. “Yeah. I guess I probably don’t keep in touch as well as I should, but yeah.”_

_The gardener (Laurent, she thought, his name is Laurent) looked past her, frowning. Malia turned and saw only the cedar tree at the center of the courtyard. When she looked back, Laurent’s attention had moved down to the pool. He pointed at it. “Look here,” he said._

_Malia got up and walked to the edge of the pool. There were shadows inside, shapes she couldn’t quite make out. She got onto her hands and knees for a better look._

_There, writhing in the depths, were her friends: Scott, Stiles, Lydia, Liam – and more of them, out of sight, just shadows in the water. They all seemed to be struggling to surface, like something was holding them down, clinging at their ankles._

_She looked up across the surface of the pool and saw the front desk attendant sitting at the opposite end of the pool, in full uniform, a maroon suit with white trim. His legs, dress pants and shiny black dress shoes and all, dangled into the water._

“ _How are you liking your room?” he asked._

_She frowned and glanced toward it – room 102, just behind the pool. “It’s fine.”_

“ _I bet we could get you an upgrade,” he said._

* * *

  
  


It was nearing one in the morning by the time Stiles and Peter stumbled out of the pity party in Scott’s room. All three of them had managed to get good and drunk, but based on the way he was weaving as he made for the stairs, Stiles had done the best job of it.

Peter hurried to catch up to him just in time to keep him from toppling over when his foot caught on a paving stone. “Come on,” he grumbled. “No way you’ll get up these stairs on your own.”

He kept one arm tight around Stiles’s middle, the other clutching the railing of the stairs as he hauled them up to the second floor. Stiles seemed content to let Peter lug him around, hanging off of him like a dead weight and barely lifting his feet from step to step. When they reached the second floor balcony, Peter had to rest a moment, leaning back against the balcony railing.

“You’re so strong,” Stiles slurred. It came out more like ‘ _Yersho shrong.’_ His head lolled onto Peter’s shoulder.

“Lucky for you,” Peter snorted. He’d blame the booze for the way his fingers immediately rose up to stroke Stiles’s hair. After just a moment’s rest, he made himself stop and pushed away from the railing. “Let’s get you to bed.”

He tugged at Stiles’s arm, but instead of lazily following along like Peter had expected, there was a sudden push that unbalanced him, sent him stumbling until his back hit a hotel room door. Before he had regained his sense of equilibrium, Stiles was up in his space, pressing him back, lips hot against his jaw. “Gonna take me to bed?” he purred.

Peter groaned. He so hated to be the better person in any situation. A hand on either of Stiles’s shoulders, he pushed him back. “You’re drunk.”

“So’re you,” Stiles accused, pouting.

“You’re drunker,” Peter shot back, “and you don’t even like me.”

Stiles barked a loud laugh at that, head falling back with the movement.

“What’s so funny?”

Grinning, Stiles swayed back into his space, and Peter let him fall against his chest. He wasn’t kissing him this time, at least. Just resting with his face pressed to Peter’s shoulder. “I’ve had a thing for you for like…” He trailed off for too long, brain obviously working at half speed. “...fuck, a decade. I’m so _old_.”

Peter snorted. “I’m older.” Jesus, a decade. That would mean Stiles had been lusting after him in his teen years, when Peter was nothing more than another villain in his nightmarish coming of age.

Stiles pulled back just enough to smile up at him and tease a hand into Peter’s hair. “I know. You’re getting grays.”

Peter swatted Stiles’s hand away with a scowl and a sharply barked, “I am not!” a bit too loud for this time of night.

“No, you’re not,” Stiles conceded. “C’mon, let’s just...” He reached around Peter for the door handle, which turned easily, unlocked. The door slid open, and they both stilled.

It wasn’t Stiles’s room, but in the shadow of night, it was difficult to say how he had known so immediately. It felt different. Wrong. The shadows of furniture inside were in the wrong places, too. From somewhere inside, Peter heard a whisper:

“ _Killer, killer, killer.”_

Peter stood frozen, clutching Stiles to his chest with shaking hands.

“ _You killed me, Peter_.”

“Peter?” Stiles murmured.

He pushed Stiles back and closed the door. The golden numbers painted on the door were peeling: 203.

“You’re too drunk to know where your own room is,” Peter accused, hefting Stiles back and away from the door. “I’m putting you to bed. And then _I’m_ going to _my_ bed.”

Stiles pouted, but didn’t argue. He just said, “You suck.”

* * *

  
  


Jordan couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so soundly. He groaned as stretched under the covers, debating between getting up and trying to roll over and sleep some more. But the sun was filtering in through the frosted windows, casting rainbows on the opposite wall.

Normally, he would go for a run before his morning shower, but… well, he was on vacation after all. He might as well take it easy. Jordan got up and turned on the radio on the nightstand. There weren’t many stations, and none he was familiar with. A lot of classical music and jazz. He finally found one playing classic rock and left it on as he showered and shaved.

When he stepped out of the bathroom again, he glanced around the room with a sudden rush of confusion. He didn’t have a bag with him. The only clothes were the ones he’d worn the day before, heaped on the floor.

A knock on the door startled him from his confusion, followed by a cheerful call of, “Laundry service!”

He quickly wrapped a towel around his waist before peeking the door open and poking his head out. A pretty young woman stood outside, wearing a bright yellow maid’s uniform. She had brown hair, cropped just above her shoulders. Her name tag said ‘Tracy.’

The radio sang,

“ _Who's that knockin' on my door?  
Who's that rising up from under the floor?  
I know, I can hear that demon roar,  
But I don't care, I ain't gonna hear it no more.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: more drowning imagery, canon-typical physical altercation between Theo and Liam, drunkenness
> 
> Lyrics are from "Devil's Bite" by Todd Rundgren


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chris grows suspicious of the hotel. Stiles is mortified about trying to kiss Peter. Kira and Malia start to make peace.

Chris’s room was on the second floor, in the corner opposite the stairs. As he headed toward them, the door of the room next to his – 206 – flung open and nearly smacked him in the face. He jumped back quickly, moving toward the railing.

Kira’s face appeared from around the door, mouth stretched in an ‘O’ of surprise before she squeaked, “I’m so sorry! Oh my gosh, I didn’t hit you did I?”

“No, my reflexes are a little better than that,” he assured her.

“Good,” she sighed. Then, with a grin, she added, “You look nice this morning!”

He looked down at his loose blue button-down shirt and white linen pants. It wasn’t exactly his normal attire, but that was alright. It was vacation. He was trying something new.

“Thanks, you too,” he said, eyes falling to the thick, turquoise-beaded necklace around her throat. The beads were strung on leather and sinew, hanging in a triangular shape with small animal claws dangling below. “That necklace… the skinwalkers gave it to you?”

Kira touched it, as if only just remembering that it was there. “When they told me I was ready to go home,” she agreed.

Chris smiled. “Are you heading down to breakfast?”

They caught up with Jordan walking into the lobby, and Chris couldn’t help but think that this was nice, having them together like this. It had been too long, members of their crisis-made little family scattered to their own missions, circumstances, aspirations. For a while, they had tried to get together for New Years or Fourth of July – any time they could gather that wasn’t because something was trying to kill them.

But Ethan and Jackson were in London, Chris and Isaac in France. Lydia went to MIT and settled in on the east coast. Stiles’s job took him all over the place, but lately it was DC. Derek spent a lot of his time in South America with Cora, and Malia had gone sort of feral, searching for her mother.

People drift apart. Chris knew that better than most. Still, it felt good to have the McCall pack coming together. It felt right.

In the bar, Scott and Stiles sat at the corner table, food already in front of them. Stiles looked miserably hungover. “Just order a drink, dude,” Scott was saying as Jordan and Chris approached. “It’s vacation. No one’s gonna judge you. And it’ll take the edge off.”

Stiles, his face pressed against the wood table, just gave a miserable moan. There was nothing but dry toast on his plate, but he hadn’t touched it.

“Should we find somewhere else to sit?” Jordan asked, smirking.

Scott’s face lit up. “No way, man! Come on, sit down.” He scooted over, even though there was plenty of space already.

“I take it someone overdid it last night?” Chris asked as he sat.

He paused, realizing that Kira hadn’t sat down with them, and looked over to see her standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. She gave them a nervous smile. “I’m, um, I’m gonna sit with Hayden,” she said, ducking her head.

Taking a more attentive overview of the bar, Chris realized that there were some clear divisions in seating. Hayden and Kira sat together. Malia and Peter. Theo and Josh sat at the bar, where Theo seemed to be making a heroic effort at getting drunk first thing in the morning. He slammed down an empty glass, and the bartender had it replaced with a full one within seconds.

“Can’t avoid the drama, even on vacation, huh?” he observed.

Scott looked away. “It’s a long story.”

“It’s a _stupid_ story,” Stiles mumbled against the wood.

A waiter with broad shoulders and dirty blonde hair approached with a tray of drinks. “Coffees for you gentlemen,” he said, setting mugs down in front of Chris and Jordan. “And with a bit of whiskey for Mr. Stilinski.” He winked.

Stiles finally lifted his head to look at his coffee, then up at their waiter. “You are my favorite person, Jerome,” he declared solemnly.

“Late night, huh?” Jordan asked.

“Stiles can’t hold his liquor,” Scott agreed.

Chris snorted. “Well, not compared to _you_.”

Stiles and Scott both looked at him with curious expressions, and Chris realized that he had no idea why he’d said that.

“Anyway,” Jordan said, cutting through the awkwardness, “what are you both up to today?”

Chris half-listened to their talk, attention pulled away as Kira and Hayden got up from their table and hugged. Hayden left the bar. Then, looking a bit shaken, Kira approached Malia and Peter’s table. She stood there, hands twisting anxiously in front of herself as she spoke too softly for Chris to hear.

Peter nodded and got up, vacating his seat for Kira. With his plate and coffee in hand, he made his way over to their larger table.

“-might stand a chance against him today,” Scott was saying as Chris tuned back in to their conversation. “Normally the only one that can beat Stiles at chess is – ”

“Peter,” Chris greeted, keeping his expression carefully neutral. They weren’t on awful terms these days, but that was mostly because they hadn’t seen one another in more than two years.

Stiles made a sudden move, his knee smacking audibly into something under the table. His face twisted up in pain as he groaned, “ _Mother-shitting son of a fuck_.”

“Mind if I pull up a chair?” Peter asked.

Jordan, always with the good manners, agreed, “Sure,” and made room for Peter’s plate while Peter brought a chair over.

“You okay, dude?” Scott asked.

“ _No_ ,” Stiles gasped.

“I’ve got breakfast for you here,” the waiter announced. Jerome set a plate of pancakes and bacon in front of Jordan, an omelet for Chris.

“Did you order?” Jordan asked. The table went silent, uncomfortable as they stared at him.

Chris looked at Jordan’s startled expression, then down at his plate. It was exactly what he’d wanted. “Yeah,” Chris said, because obviously he had. What sort of question was that? He shook his head to try to clear the strange sense of disorientation. “You sure you didn’t get your coffee mixed up with Stiles’s?”

Jordan laughed, thanked the waiter, and the moment passed. Stiles started sipping at his coffee, nibbling at his toast. He kept throwing odd looks in Peter’s direction, and Peter kept his eyes on anyone _except_ Stiles.

Drama. Always with the drama.

Scott and Jordan did the brunt of the work in keeping the conversation flowing while Chris tucked into his food, but the topic soon turned to him. Or, rather, his house.

“I think I’m the only one that hasn’t seen the new house, right, Chris?” Jordan asked. The house in Vienne, he meant. Scott, Stiles, and Kira had finally come out for a visit two summers prior. Lydia had visited with Jackson and Ethan on a few occasions now.

“Well, Peter hasn’t,” Chris pointed out. He glanced to the side, making a point of adding, “You’re not invited.”

Peter sneered over the top of his coffee cup. “Lyon is a bit stuck-up for my tastes anyway.”

“It’s outside Lyon,” Chris said.

“Even worse.”

“Oh my god,” Stiles mumbled into his coffee.

Chris decided to ignore them both. “Anyway, you’re welcome to visit any time you want, Jordan.”

“I’ll come with,” Scott volunteered. “It’d be nice to see Isaac again.”

That triggered something in his memory, but it took his brain a moment to catch up with it. Maybe _he’d_ gotten the whiskey coffee by mistake. Hell, maybe they’d all gotten whiskey coffee. “I forgot to mention,” he said, cutting off the next tangent of the conversation, “Isaac said he might come, too.”

“What!” Scott shouted, too loud. Stiles winced at the volume and groaned. “That’s awesome!”

Behind him, Chris heard the scrape of wood against the floor, footsteps coming up behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Theo standing a few feet from the table. “Couldn’t help but overhear,” he said. “Did you say Isaac is coming?”

Chris kept his eyes on Theo as Stiles asked, “Dude, do you even know Isaac?”

“It’s a whole family reunion, isn’t it?” Theo commented, and it sounded like he meant to be aloof, but there was a tension in his tone that betrayed something darker. “Any other surprises?”

“Maybe a few,” Chris replied evenly.

Theo stared at Chris, then looked up at the others at the table. He nodded slowly, then walked back to the bar. He knocked back the rest of whatever was in his glass. They all watched as he stalked out into the lobby, past where Malia and Kira were still deep in conversation.

Chris narrowed his eyes. The others at the table had already started chatting, Stiles lamenting, “That dude is _so weird_. Why is he even here?”

Turning to the bar, Chris’s focus zeroed in on Josh. “Hey,” he called, and it took a moment for Josh to turn around to look at him. “What’s his deal?” Chris asked. “Theo?”

Josh snorted and bit into a piece of bacon. “Him? He’s been weird this whole trip. Some people just don’t know how to relax.”

“Who’s idea was it to come here?” Chris asked, and suddenly more people than Josh were looking at him. Even the bartender, a severe looking woman with an eye patch, stared at him.

Scott cut the tension. “Hey, I’m gonna go get my swim trunks on. Come find me at the pool later if you want to swim, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Chris agreed. He turned back around and saw that his plate was almost empty. He ate the last bite of omelet. “Plan on it.”

* * *

  
  


Despite half of his brain still sloshing in the aftershocks of too much booze, Stiles settled himself at the stone chess table in the courtyard, playing against himself. Part of him hoped that Peter would come sit on the other side and take over the white pieces. Part of him dreaded the idea.

God, he’d _kissed_ Peter. Or tried to, at least. He didn’t think he’d actually managed any lip-to-lip action, though the memory was foggy at best. Of course, the memory that did come through clear as a bell was Peter pushing him away.

In high school, his crush on Peter had been weird and confusing and easy to brush aside as the unfortunate product of Stiles’s hormones mixed with Peter’s sexy Satan vibes. Now? Now, Stiles was a full-grown adult with no excuse for this fetish for low-grade evil and high-grade snobbery.

He glared as he slammed his knight down with more force than was strictly necessary.

“Interesting game you’ve got going here.”

Stiles didn’t bother to ease his murderous expression before looking up at Theo.

Theo sat down anyway, making a rapid assessment of the board. He grabbed a bishop and slid it over to threaten Stiles’s rook.

“What the hell do you want?” Stiles grumbled.

“You looked like you could use some company,” Theo replied in that sleazy-friendly tone of his. God, Stiles hated that tone. “Trouble in paradise?” Theo asked.

“It’s none of your goddamn business.”

Theo sighed, leaning back in his chair. “You know, people keep telling me that.”

“Maybe because it’s true?”

“Come on,” Theo goaded. “No one wants to talk to me. That makes me the perfect person to dish to about all of your personal issues. Who am I gonna tell?”

Stiles moved a pawn behind his rook for defense. “And should I bother asking why you care?”

“I’m just here to lend a friendly ear.” Theo beamed at him.

“So, no,” Stiles concluded. “No, I shouldn’t have bothered. God, your skeezy serial killer vibes have gotten worse with age, you know that?”

Theo tipped his head to the side. “And here I thought you were into that.” He took Stiles’s pawn with his knight.

Stiles narrowed his eyes. Fuck. Either Theo was still pulling his creepy stalker vibes or _everyone_ knew something was going on with him and Peter. Still, he found himself relenting. He really did need to vent. “I made a move on Peter. He wasn’t into it.”

“Was this last night?” Theo asked, grin slipping into a condescending smirk that Stiles wanted to smack right off his stupid face.

“Yeah.” Stiles shifted his rook over, next to Theo’s knight.

“Last night when you were falling over drunk?” Theo pressed.

Stiles huffed and rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m aware I didn’t exactly make an enticing image of myself last night. Thank you for the reminder.”

Theo laughed quietly, eyes fixed on the board. “I’m saying that Peter turned down a guy too drunk to say his own name on the first try, not you. It would have been gross if he’d fucked you last night.”

“You’re gross,” Stiles shot back defensively. “Take your turn.”

“I’m thinking,” Theo insisted. “And, for the record, I think he’s into you, too. He’s been making cow eyes at you from the balcony for five minutes.”

Stiles whipped his head around just in time to see Peter’s door pulling closed.

“You should go for it,” Theo added.

Turning back around, Stiles insisted, “It would never work out. He drinks eighty dollar bottles of Cabernet, I drink store brand hard seltzer. I live in DC, he lives in California. I work for the FBI, he’s a serial killer. You see, they’re little details, but they add up.”

Theo lifted a shoulder. “So what? Who says it has to work out? You’re on vacation. Shack up. Have a fling.” His tone softened as he added, “Let yourself have some fun while you have the chance.” He finally reached for his knight, then moved it in a diagonal across the board.

Stiles frowned. “Your knight can’t move like that.”

Theo stood up and stepped back. “Stiles,” he said sharply. “They’re all pawns.”

Stiles stared at Theo as he walked away, then looked back down at the board. Sure enough, the pieces were pawns, every one.

* * *

  
  


The door to 301 creaked open, and Jordan asked, “Chris? What are you doing up here?”

Chris glanced over his shoulder from where he stood at the railing. Jordan stood in the doorway to his room, hair still wet from swimming, wearing a polo shirt that fit a bit too tightly in the arms. “Just wanted to see the view from up here,” Chris explained, carefully casual.

“Oh,” Jordan said, relaxing. He stepped up beside Chris, eyes scanning over the courtyard below. “Yeah, it’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?”

It was. The hotel was beautifully built, well-landscaped, carefully maintained. From the third floor balcony, he could see the guests and staff milling about below, partly obscured by the rowan tree in the center, its branches heavy with berries.

Chris frowned at that. Something about the tree didn’t seem right.

“Jordan, what’s the name of this place again?” Chris asked.

“The Royal Rowan Hotel.”

Something was wrong with the tree. Something was wrong with this whole place.

He’d taken stock of the staff he’d seen so far: two maids, the desk attendant, the bartender and waiter, presumably at least one cook, and the gardener. Another man stopped in the entrance of the lobby below and looked up at Chris. The security guard. He kept stopping to look at Chris.

Jordan turned, leaning back against the railing. “I was thinking of going to check out the gardens,” he said. “You want to come with?”

Chris shook his head. “No, I think I’m going back to my room,” he decided. He headed for the stairs.

On the second floor balcony, he bumped into the laundry girl, Tracy. She had a bag tucked under one arm.

“Excuse me,” he said. “You use markers to label the tags on the laundry bags, right?”

She shifted the bag, tucked her hair behind her ear. “Um, yes.”

“Any chance I could borrow one?”

Tracy looked at him curiously, but reached into the pocket of her apron, producing a fat black marker. “No problem,” she said. “Can I get you anything else?”

Chris took the marker and offered her one of his more charming smiles. “No, you’ve been very helpful,” he assured her. “Thank you.”

His room was an L-shape, in the corner of the building. The bathroom hugged the inside corner of the room, on the walls he shared with the balcony. The rest of the room wrapped around it, with the TV and couch in the corner just inside the door, the table and chairs in the outermost corner, and the bed past that, furthest from the door. It was a good layout. If someone were to open the door while he was sleeping, the bed was sheltered away from it, giving him plenty of time to react.

Normal people didn’t think about their vacation hotel rooms this way. He knew that. Chris wasn’t a normal person.

He went to the table in the corner and dragged it closer to the window for the most light. Then, using the marker, he drew a square directly on the wood. Chris started with the first floor, approximating the locations of different rooms and labeling what he knew. It was tricky – there were a lot of staff areas that he wouldn’t know or have access to, so he could only guess at the kitchens, the laundry, the office. Then he moved on to the second floor, which was all rooms, and a smaller rectangle for the third floor.

Chris stepped back and studied [his floor plans](https://imgur.com/a/uMDo9At). The third floor was accounted for. The first floor was either accounted for or could be reasonably assumed. The second, though…

Liam and Hayden were in rooms 201 and 202. Stiles and Peter in 204 and 205. Right there in the corner between Hayden and Stiles, though – how had he not noticed that corner room or the missing number? It was right by the stairs. He’d walked by it. How had he missed it?

Room 203.

* * *

  
  


A few gardens beyond Kira’s favorite, the hedges opened onto a massive lawn, sparsely decorated with stone benches, neat evergreen trees, and patches of flowers – yellow irises and roses in varying shades. There was no pathway, but the garden’s exit was clearly visible from its entrance.

“I feel like this one is _too_ open,” Hayden remarked, stepping out onto the grass and spreading her arms wide.

Kira went to the first patch of roses, bending down for a sniff. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s sort of like… minimalist, you know? It’s a nice break compared to some of the others.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Hayden agreed. She hopped onto one of the stone benches and gazed thoughtfully toward the tops of the surrounding hedges. They were too tall to see anything but sky beyond.

Reaching into the rose bush, Kira tried to twist one of the stems to pluck a flower. It didn’t budge, but one of the thorns did bite into her finger. She hissed and stepped back, sticking it into her mouth.

Hayden put her hands on her hips. “You know, there’s only about a thousand sayings about roses having thorns,” she chided.

Kira rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”

They continued on to the next garden, this one much more elaborately decorated. Palm trees arched over the pebbled pathway, huge broad-leafed plants framing intricately carved wooden structures. Little temples, Kira thought, with sharp peaks, dragons and abstract wood carvings jutting out at the corners. There was a stone Buddha in the center, thin with long, hanging earlobes. He sat on a stone pedestal, surrounded by thick foliage.

“This one feels like a holy site,” Kira said as she stared at the Buddha. “Not just because of him. The whole place, it just feels...” She struggled to find the right word.

“Old,” Hayden offered. “It feels really old.”

A lot of the gardens did, Kira realized. Maybe all of them. They felt like stepping into another time.

“So do you feel like you and Malia are okay now?” Hayden asked. She had taken a seat on a bench by one of the temple structures.

Kira tipped her head to the side. “Better, at least,” she agreed. They had talked over breakfast that morning, Kira spilling her guts about the whole thing: her anxieties over Malia and Scott having dated while Kira was gone, how she loved Scott and it would be so easy to just blame Malia. In the end, she knew that fidelity had been Scott’s responsibility, and she didn’t even know for sure that it _was_ Malia who had left those marks on him.

Malia listened, of course. She was a really good listener.

“I just don’t really know how to move forward from it, you know?” Kira continued. “He won’t talk to me about it. He just looks sad and guilty and doesn’t _say_ anything. How do I move forward from that?”

“I don’t know,” Hayden admitted. “I don’t know what I would do if it was Liam.”

“You and Liam have been together for, like, eight years, though,” Kira reminded her. “Has either of you even dated anyone else?”

Hayden shook her head. “Nope. We tried to take a break freshman year, get some new experiences, but we both ended up just miserable and missing one another.”

Kira smiled at her. “You’re really lucky, you know that?”

“Your finger is really bleeding,” Hayden said suddenly, standing up.

Looking down, Kira saw that the blood from her thorn-prick was dripping freely onto the stones below. A crow screeched in the trees behind her, and she whirled around at the noise. Another crow landed on a branch nearby, then another. A screech came from the other direction, and she saw three more perched on the roof of the temple.

Suddenly, Hayden was at her side, a hand on her lower back. “We should go,” she whispered.

They nearly ran back to the hotel.

* * *

  
  


The security guard, a stern-faced man named Jean, walked a loop around the courtyard every thirty minutes or so between sundown and sunrise. Between rounds, he either went into the lobby our out toward the gardens, alternating. It wasn’t completely consistent, but Chris had been watching him for two days, and he had a decent sense of the pattern before he decided to make his move.

Chris turned the lights in his room off, then cracked the door open and peeked out. He could see Jean on the third floor, headed toward the stairs. He descended, then disappeared out of view of the door.

Chris waited two minutes for him to cross the courtyard, then slipped out. Standing at the balcony, he paused, looking at the tree in the courtyard. It looked different than it had earlier, and he didn’t think it was just the change in lighting. There were hanging lanterns along the pathway in the courtyard, which cast an orange glow against the lower branches of the tree.

There were no berries. He could have sworn there were red berries on it before. But that didn’t make sense. Arbor vitae trees, when they did produce berries, only produced chalky blue ones.

Shaking off the unease that set into him, he continued around the balcony, creeping quietly. The others stayed out late, swimming and relaxing in the hot tub until well after midnight. Now, in the early hours of the morning, the hotel was still and silent. Any creak of the floorboards might give away his movements.

When he reached the opposite corner of the balcony, Chris stopped and stared at the shadowed door behind the stairs. 203. He had walked by it without ever noticing it. He knew of the types of magic that could cause that effect.

The doorknob turned, the door opening without any resistance.

Inside, the room was pitch black, no windows facing the courtyard to let in the lantern light. He closed the door behind him before searching for the light switch. No sooner had he flipped it, turning on a dim light behind him, than he heard a familiar voice:

“Hey, big brother.”

The lights went out again.

Chris whirled around, trying to determine in the darkness where her voice had come from. “Kate?” he hissed. “How in the hell are you alive?”

“Oh, that’s not very nice,” she laughed, somewhere in front of him.

Another voice chimed in from his left, “You didn’t really think I’d kill my own daughter, did you?”

Ice settled low in his stomach. This whole thing – the hotel, gathering the pack, the magic – it was all a plan by his father. Had to be. “What do you want?” Chris demanded.

Curtains pulled back from the outer windows, letting in just the slightest glow of moonlight. It was just enough to see Gerard’s face as he stepped closer. “I want you to answer for what you’ve done to our family,” he growled. “How do you justify destroying our legacy? Our entire line is ended now.”

A flash of teeth to his right had Chris spinning again to see Kate, grinning, her face inhuman. “Parents, right?” she said. “Always bitching about grandchildren.”

Chris reached to his belt, but found nothing there. No protection, no weapons. A hand wrapped around his waist, and he froze. He hadn’t heard anyone coming up behind him. There should have been no more than two feet between his back and the wall. Lips brushed against his ear.

“You let our daughter die,” Victoria said.

“No,” he snapped, wrenching away from her, putting space between himself and his dead wife. It put him closer to Gerard and Kate, farther from the door, but tactics meant nothing with a ghost. “You’re dead,” he said firmly. “I held you while you died.”

“You didn’t hold her,” Victoria sneered, her lips curling back. “You let that animal hold her while she died. You let her play with monsters until a monster ran her through.”

The accusation caught at his throat so fiercely, she might as well have wrapped a hand around it. “She died protecting her friends,” he argued. “She died doing what she believed in.”

“What she believed in?” Kate snapped. She laughed. “Allison was a _child_ , Chris. Your child. You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to guide her onto the right path.”

“And what would you know about the right path!” Chris roared at her. “You broke our code, then became the very thing you used to hunt!”

Gerard stepped closer. “Necessary evils, Christopher. Allison’s death wasn’t necessary. It was a mistake. Your mistake.”

Chris put his back to the windows, the cold of the glass leaching through his shirts. He tried to get himself back on track, figure out his next step. “If Victoria is dead, you two are, too,” he said. “You’re all just ghosts.”

Kate came right up into his space and placed a hand, firm and very real feeling, against his chest. She could no doubt feel his heart racing. “Maybe,” she agreed, “but does it really matter?”

“You let her die,” Victoria said again.

“You let our whole family die,” Kate agreed.

“Look at you,” Gerard snarled, “surrounded by ghosts. Do the adolescent monsters you associate with now make you feel less responsible? Do they tell you it’s not your fault?”

Victoria stepped up closer. “You think they can replace what you had? You think the orphan you let into your home makes you a father again?”

“Shut up!” Chris snapped.

“They’ll never trust you enough to be your family, Chris,” Kate cooed, petting his hair. “They know exactly how you treated your real family.”

He shoved her back, shoved past all of them as they followed, all of them cursing him, spewing hatred and blame. _You did this, you did this, you did this_. _Your fault_.

Chris put his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut. A blow struck at his back, and he fell to his knees, unwilling to take his hands off his ears.

Then a soft hand touched his face. Delicate.

Chris opened his eyes to see Allison’s face, pale and sweet in the moonlight. She looked heartbroken. She pulled his hands away from his ears. “It’s okay, Dad,” she whispered. “You don’t have to listen to them.” She clasped his hands between her own and smiled. “If you want, you don’t ever have to hear them again, okay?”

* * *

  
  


_Stiles leaned against the side of his car, trying to force himself to take at least momentary breaks between sips of coffee. He had driven all the way to Beacon Hills, a straight 9-hour shot from his last job in Seattle. It would be another four hours straight west into the desert after this, but he knew better than to try to go without backup, even if his options were limited._

_The door to the apartment building swung outward, and Peter stepped onto the sidewalk. His nose wrinkled, and he turned to look at Stiles immediately. His eyes narrowed._

“ _Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a social call?” he greeted._

_Stiles smirked. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s not official FBI business either.”_

“ _So an off-books supernatural existential threat,” Peter summed up, folding his arms over his chest so the sleeves strained under his biceps. Fuck, how had he gotten even hotter since the last time Stiles saw him? It really wasn’t fair._

“ _I actually have no idea what we’re dealing with yet,” Stiles admitted._

_Peter narrowed his eyes, looking irritated. Stiles got the sense that he was more irritated at himself, though, at knowing that he would help even though he shouldn’t. “And why should I make this my problem?” he demanded._

_Stiles studied Peter’s expression for any sign of the old malice or coldness that had lived there when they first met. Peter, despite his insistence to the contrary, had mellowed out over the years. Stiles lifted a shoulder. “I’d owe you a favor?”_

_Leaning closer, Peter placed a hand against the car next to Stiles’s head, boxing him in. “What kind of favor?”_

_God, it would have been so easy to give the flirtatious response, to banter back-and-forth and let himself toy with the idea of this thing that they both knew would never happen, never work. But his pack was in trouble. Scott, Kira, Malia, and maybe Liam and Hayden now. Stiles didn’t have time to indulge in fantasies._

_Stiles looked Peter in the eye, steady. “The no questions asked kind,” he said. “Now get in the car.”_

* * *

  
  


Things had evened out between Malia and Kira, but awkwardness lingered over their pack, especially at breakfast when everyone but Liam tended to gather at the same time. Kira and Scott could still barely look at one another. Something had clearly gone down between Stiles and Peter, because Stiles got weird every time Peter tried to sit at the same table as him. Even weirder, Theo had started to sit by Stiles and Peter, which neither of them seemed particularly pleased with.

Between that and the sheer number of pack members now staying at the hotel and crowding around the bar and tables in the morning, seating arrangements had gotten unpredictable.

Which was how Malia found herself sitting across from Chris at one of the small tables that morning, smiling around a spoonful of oatmeal while he explained the complicated territorial politics of France’s supernatural populations.

“So we think we’ve got the whole thing worked out perfectly, right? Boundaries drawn, concessions agreed to, everything. We’ve spent literally months drawing all of this up. And then this smartmouth beta from the Noyer pack comes in, insisting that they can’t accept the mountainous regions they’ve been allotted because they’re infested with _dahu_. Which is...” He paused to laugh, shaking his head and taking another bite of his toast. “They’re these weird little goat things, but they’re not real. It’s basically the French equivalent of the jersey devil. It’s a joke, right?”

Malia grinned and nodded.

“So, of course, everyone else is just insulted that they’d make up such a stupid objection, but the Noyer insist it’s true. There’s dahu in the mountains. Well, the alpha of the Sauveterre pack is so pissed off, she says, ‘You know what? Take me to the mountains. If I see one dahu, you can have half of my allotment.”

Jordan got up from the larger table and came up behind Chris. “Hey, sorry to interrupt,” he said.

Chris didn’t react, just kept telling his story. “So we all go out to these mountains, big waste of everyone’s time, but we have to settle this stupid thing.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Jordan said a little louder. “I just wanted to ask – ” He set a hand on Chris’s shoulder, and Chris nearly jumped out of his seat, spinning around, eyes wide.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Jordan apologized. “I was going to the gardens today, and...”

But Malia stopped listening to Jordan, eyes fixed on Chris’s face as he stared at Jordan in bewilderment, eyes fixed on his mouth. Reading his lips.

Of course, Malia realized, not sure why the thought had surprised her so much. Chris couldn’t hear.

* * *

  
  


Peter had been lurking in the courtyard, reading a book in the shade of the hawthorn tree with one eye on the stairs. Stiles had been avoiding him for nearly a week, sitting far away from him at breakfast and going to lunch and dinner at odd hours. This evening, there would be no avoiding him.

After about an hour, he finally saw Stiles coming down the spiral staircase, alone. Peter let him get halfway through the courtyard before he caught up.

“Getting dinner? I was just headed that way,” Peter greeted.

Stiles startled, looking over at him, wide-eyed. “Oh. Um. I think – I think I’m just gonna get something to go,” he decided.

They both stepped into the lobby. Peter rolled his eyes and grabbed Stiles’s elbow to stop him from making a quick escape. “Would you relax?” he snapped. “Come on, we need to talk about this.”

“Talk about what!” Stiles squeaked. His cheeks went pink.

“Even for you, you’re acting bizarrely,” Peter explained patiently, “and I know what it’s about. Can we both just be adults about this?” Despite Stiles’s stubborn eye contact with the tile floor, Peter barreled on: “You were drunk. It didn’t mean anything. It’s not a big deal.”

Stiles’s eyes hesitantly lifted from the floor, guarded. “It’s not a big deal,” he echoed, doubtful.

Peter laughed. “Oh, grow up. I’m not going to hold it over your head that you’re a frisky drunk.”

“That’s...” Stiles flushed darker and looked away. “That’s not what that was,” he said.

That night, when Stiles tried to kiss him, he’d admitted that he had a crush on Peter when he was a teenager. But surely all this time later, any feelings left were just that – leftovers. Nostalgia. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be something _real_ , something current. Honestly, he didn’t know what to say.

He was saved from a response as the doors to the hotel opened. They both looked up just in time to see Isaac step through the doors. Peter hadn’t seen him since the last time he was in the states, maybe four years prior. He had a goatee now, but still wore those stupid scarves. He looked around the lobby curiously.

“Mr. Lahey,” the attendant greeted.

Behind Stiles, Theo rushed out of the bar and into the lobby. He groaned. “ _No_.”

Then the doors opened again, and Jackson and Ethan stepped in behind Isaac.

“Mr. and Mr. Steiner-Whittemore,” the attendant added. “Welcome to the Hawthorn Hotel.”

Theo stumbled where he stood, clearly drunk. “No!” he shouted, looking wildly between the three new arrivals, the attendant, and Stiles and Peter. “You fucks!”

“What the hell, Theo?” Stiles said, turning to look as Theo descended into panic.

“You fucking idiots!” he yelled at Stiles. “Do you have any idea what you fucking did!?” He stumbled forward, jabbing a finger toward the attendant. “And you! What the fuck is the matter with you! You don’t have enough?”

The new arrivals stood frozen at the door.

Peter stepped forward. It wasn’t his business, but he did hate for Theo to cause a scene right as Isaac, Jackson, and Ethan were trying to settle in for their vacations. “Come on, you’ve had too much to drink,” he insisted. “You should head back to your room.”

Theo started laughing, maniacally, curling forward. His lips curled back in something like a snarl. “No!” he snapped, still looking at the attendant. “No, fuck this! This is bullshit! You can’t do this!”

The security guard, Jean, walked out from the office behind the front desk.

Theo’s ferocity fell back into more abject fear. “No,” he said, pleading this time. “No, no, no! You can’t! You can’t!”

Jean held out a hand. “Mr. Raeken, you’re causing a disturbance,” he said in his thickly accented English. “You need to come with me.”

“Fuck you!” Theo spat as Jean grabbed him by the arm. He fought, trying to wrench away, but Jean had a firm grip. He dragged Theo toward the office, screaming all the way. Just as the office door opened again, Theo looked back at Stiles and Peter and snarled, “You did this! All of you idiots did this!”

The door slammed shut, and there was silence.

“Welcome to the Hawthorn Hotel, gentlemen,” the attendant said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: ghosts/hallucinations which lead to Chris losing his ability to hear
> 
> There will be smut next chapter!!!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles and Peter finally clear up their misunderstandings. Isaac, Jackson, and Ethan catch up with the rest of the pack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here there be smut! No specific warnings for this chapter.

Hayden was picking through Liam’s shirts, just settling on a white polo, when she heard a tell-tale thump from behind her. “Oh no you don’t!” she scolded, wheeling around to see Liam flopped back on the bed, his shorts still unbuttoned.

“I’m _so tired_ ,” he whined. “Just let me sleep, like… like, twenty more minutes.”

She grabbed him by the ankle and yanked him off the bed. His butt hit the ground with a noisy thud.

“Hayden!” Liam pouted.

“I swear, this is _not cute_ ,” she snapped, shoving his shirt onto his head. “This is, like, every woman’s nightmare, having to act like her boyfriend’s mother.”

His head popped through the neck hole, revealing mussed hair and a set of truly pathetic bright blue doe eyes. “Then don’t,” he argued. “Just leave me to _sleep_.”

Hayden folded her arms over her chest and glared at him.

Liam shifted where he sat on the floor and slowly put his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. “Okay, it’s at least a little bit cute, right?” he asked.

Rolling her eyes, she hauled him to his feet. “Maybe a little,” she relented.

Still, he kept whining all the way down the stairs and into the courtyard.

“Liam, you’ve slept through every single breakfast since we got here,” Hayden said, “and we haven’t seen Isaac in ages. Get some coffee, and you’ll be fine.”

The groundskeeper was out, watering the flowers by the chess table. He offered a bright smile and a wave. “Good morning,” he greeted.

“Morning, Josh,” they said back, nearly in unison.

They were the last ones into the bar. A few tables had been pushed together so that even Kira and Scott sat together, although on opposite ends. There were two chairs left on the end, between Malia and Stiles, so they settled themselves in.

“Drinks for you both,” the waiter said, not a minute later, setting coffee in front of Liam, tea for Hayden.

Liam shot the waiter a grin. “Thanks, Theo.”

Theo smiled right back. “I’ll have breakfast out in just a few minutes. Pancakes for you, hash browns and eggs for the lady.”

Hayden opened her mouth, but he cut her off before she could speak, pointing at her.

“And a side of bacon.” Theo winked.

* * *

  
  


Stiles’s hands gripped the sides of the sink. He stared at his own face in the mirror, jaw clenched. “Just go for it,” he told his reflection. “Come on, what do you have to lose at this point, you fucking coward? You already pretty much told him. He’s not stupid. He’s figured it out anyway.”

His reflection looked pleading, but not convinced.

With a growl of frustration, he pushed away from the sink and stalked back out into the bedroom. “I’m being stupid,” he lectured at himself. Stiles pushed a hand through his hair, tugging on it. “I mean, it’s not like this is a ‘we’re gonna ruin our friendship’ moment, right? We’re not fucking friends. So what if it gets weird? I’ll be in DC, he’ll be in California, we’ll never have to see each other again. It can just be a fling. Just like – ”

Stiles paused, frowning. He could have sworn someone had said that to him, that he should shack up and have a fling. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember who.

He shook off the weirdness and settled himself into resolution, turning toward the hotel room door. This was it. He’d just walk over there, knock on Peter’s door, and –

Someone knocked on his door.

It caught him so off-guard, Stiles didn’t move at first, but then they knocked again. He rushed to the door and pulled it open.

Peter stood outside on the balcony, dressed in that stupid gaped-open dress shirt that showed his stupid, sexy chest and his stupid, sexy chest hair. He had his hands tucked into his back pockets, a restrained sort of look on his face.

“It occurs to me,” Peter began, “that we’ve had a sort of miscommunication.”

Stiles gaped at him, not sure if he felt dread or hope. “Oh?” he said, voice smaller than he meant it to be.

“I thought you were just drunk and rambling about how you used to have a crush on me,” Peter explained. “It didn’t occur to me that your feelings might still be...”

“Different!” Stiles cut in quickly. “They’re different feelings now.”

Peter’s face fell into a sort of hurt, and he took a half step back. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry, I guess I – ”

Stiles almost smacked himself in the face, but his limbs settled for flailing so that one of his hands smacked against the doorframe. “No, no! That’s not what I meant,” he insisted. “I just meant that it’s not – like, back then, it was stupid kid stuff? But now it’s… y’know…”

“Now it’s…?” Peter prompted, wary.

“Stupid adult stuff.”

Peter’s brow furrowed. “Look, given the amount of confusion we’ve already managed over the past few days, I’m going to need you to clarify what ‘stupid adult stuff’ entails.”

Stiles opened his mouth to respond, but words didn’t magically appear on his tongue like he’d hoped they might. He squinted up at the ceiling, fishing around for a delicate way to say, ‘Let’s fuck and see where it goes and it probably won’t go anywhere but I’m down to try anyway.’

The best he could come up with was, “You wanna come in and make out?”

Then it was Peter’s turn to gape and say nothing, just huffing a surprised little laugh.

“I mean ‘have sex,’” Stiles explained, talking too fast. “But ‘Do you wanna come in and have sex’ sounded weirder for some reason, and ‘Do you wanna come in and fuck me’ sounded, like, uber slutty which probably isn’t a look I can pull off.” His eyes went wide in panic as he continued to ramble, “And, I mean, if you do wanna come in and just make out, that’s cool, too! No pressure! But the sex is definitely on the menu if you want it, and I figured – ”

“Stiles?” Peter’s features had curled into amusement, eyebrows high.

“Yeah?”

Peter stepped forward over the threshold, into Stiles’s space. He wrapped a hand around the curve of Stiles’s jaw, thumb brushing over his cheek. “Shut up,” he said, and then he kissed Stiles’s breath away.

Ever the embodiment of grace, Stiles flailed an arm over Peter’s shoulder, trying to grab at the door while he also tried to focus on the press of Peter’s tongue against his lips, the scratch of stubble against his cheek. He ended up sticking a foot out and kicking it shut instead, making contact half a second before Peter was pushing him back, pinning him against the wall.

The kiss broke, and then there were lips and teeth working their way down Stiles’s throat, strong hands at his hips, pinning them to the wall. “For the record,” he murmured, teeth scraping the corner of Stiles’s jaw, “you could absolutely pull off ‘uber slutty.’”

“Good to know,” Stiles gasped. His own hands had found their way to the obscene open neckline of Peter’s shirt, slipping inside. “That puts so many new words on the table.”

Peter pulled back just a bit, his grip loosening. “Such as?”

“Such as,” Stiles replied, and then sank to his knees.

“Still waiting for the words.” Peter braced a hand on the wall behind Stiles.

“Just one word,” Stiles said. He leaned in and undid the button and zipper of Peter’s fly with his teeth. “Ta-da!”

Peter laughed and stroked a hand through Stiles’s hair. Stiles couldn’t help but warm at the fond look on his face, glad that he’d decided to take a chance on this. Or maybe it was Peter that had decided. It didn’t matter anymore.

“They teach that at Quantico?” Peter asked.

Stiles snorted as he tugged Peter’s pants around his thighs. “It’s not on the syllabus, but that _is_ where I learned it.” He leaned in and dragged his tongue over the bulge in Peter’s underwear. “Wanna see what else wasn’t on the syllabus?” He waggled his eyebrows.

“Now _that_ was uber slutty,” Peter said, and he made it sound like high praise, so Stiles didn’t protest. Far from it, he pulled Peter’s briefs out of the way and wrapped his lips around the head of his cock.

Stiles didn’t rush it, took his time working Peter up and testing out what he liked. It had been ages since he’d slept with a man. Like it or not, the FBI was a good old boys’ club, and he was always playing wingman to other dudes or getting dragged out to the sort of bars where guys picking up other guys just didn’t happen. The motions came back to him easily, though. When he cupped Peter’s balls in his hand and pressed his fingers to the skin behind, Peter groaned and jerked forward a little. When one of Peter’s hands cupped his face, Stiles turned his head and let his cock poke at his cheek, letting Peter feel himself though the skin. Seconds later, he felt the prick of claws against his face.

“Stiles,” Peter groaned. When Stiles looked up, Peter’s eyes were squeezed shut. When they opened, they were glowing bright blue.

Fuck, that shouldn’t have been as hot as it was.

Stiles pulled off, a string of spit connecting his lower lip to the head of Peter’s cock as he tipped his head back. “You wanna come like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Peter said, “but I want to fuck you more. Can I fuck you?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

* * *

  
  


Scott’s favorite garden was only four gardens in. It had a white tile walkway, lined with rich royal blue designs. It led to a tiered stone fountain in the center, bright purple flowers floating in the lowest bowl. There were smaller fountains tucked away in other corners, low mosaic walls and seating areas. Lush vining plants climbed all of it, heavy with blooms.

Isaac leaned against the large fountain in the middle, trailing his fingers in the water. “So things with you and Kira are kind of messed up, huh?”

Scott sighed, because he knew it was going to come up. It was just a matter of when. In any case, Isaac was probably exactly who he needed to be talking to about this. He sat on a bench near the fountain, elbows on his knees as he thought about how to ask this.

“When you start dating someone,” he began slowly, parsing his words and pausing to chew on his lip, “how do you explain her to them?”

Isaac’s features drew in, suddenly guarded and stern. “Allison?”

Scott nodded.

Isaac turned around to face the fountain, tracing his fingers through the water as if that was why he had turned, not because he couldn’t talk about this and look Scott in the face. “I don’t, a lot of times.”

“You just don’t tell them?”

Lifting a shoulder, Isaac explained, “Not unless I feel like it’s really going somewhere. If it’s not serious yet… why bother, you know? I’ll feel shitty and sad, and then they’ll feel shitty and sad, and it’s just gonna be a shitty, sad conversation, and –” He huffed. “– god, French people are already super depressing most of the time.”

“So when you _do_ tell them…” Scott prompted.

Isaac turned around again, this time coming to sit next to Scott on the bench. “Let me guess why you’re asking: Kira feels like she’s competing with a ghost. Is that it?”

Scott momentarily entertained the idea of explaining just how literally that was the situation. Then he remembered how worried and freaked out Stiles had looked. “Yeah, basically,” he said.

“It’s tough,” Isaac sighed. He braced his chin on his fist, elbow braced against his other arm. “Death has a way of turning people into martyrs. Allison more than most, the way she died. A hero. But it’s like… everything bad about them, you assume they just never had the chance to fix it. And everything good about them, you assume they never would have fucked it up. They’re faultless.”

“I don’t think of Allison that way,” Scott argued.

“No?” Isaac lifted a dubious eyebrow at him.

Scott slouched. “Well, maybe a little.”

Isaac smirked and bumped Scott’s shoulder with his own.

They sat silently for a long while, listening to the burble of the fountains, the titter of birds.

Finally, Isaac said, “I wish I could help you, man. I don’t know how to convince someone that you aren’t still in love with the idea of who someone could have been.” He wrapped an arm around Scott’s shoulders and squeezed. “Especially when it’s not true.”

* * *

  
  


“ _So you think you know where they are?” Jordan asked. Red and blue lights from outside flashed against his features as one of the cruisers took off out of the parking lot. “But they’re not answering their phones. None of them?”_

_Chris looked around himself, frowning. The precinct was dark, empty except for him and Jordan. There weren’t even any other desks, just Jordan’s, right in the middle of the room. They sat on either side of it, Jordan’s hands folded on top of a manila envelope._

“ _This isn’t right,” Chris said._

“ _What?” Jordan looked confused._

“ _Um, I mean...” Chris scrubbed at his face, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. “I know where they went. That doesn’t mean I know where they are.”_

_Jordan frowned. “It sounds like a trap.”_

_The same lights flashed across his face, exactly the same as before._

“ _This isn’t right,” Chris repeated, pushing up out of his chair._

“ _What are you doing?”_

_Chris turned, trying to make sense of the papers and pictures hung on the wall. It was like he could see them, but he couldn’t absorb what it was he saw. He sighed. “I’m forgetting something.”_

“ _Chris, sit down,” Jordan said. “We’ve got seven missing people.”_

“ _I’m forgetting something.” Chris stalked to the door of the station and yanked it open. He walked through it and right back into the station, through one of the staff doors. He turned and went back the other way, right back through the front doors._

“ _Chris!” Jordan snapped._

_He went to Jordan’s desk. It was covered in papers and stacks of envelopes, nothing written on any of them. Sweeping them all aside, Chris saw strange black markings on the wood underneath. Squares._

Chris sat straight up when he woke, sucking in a panicked breath. He got up and walked to the table in the corner of his room, a glass of water resting on the end. He drained half of it in one gulp.

When he set the glass down, his eyes caught on a smudge of black on the surface of the table. Just a little angle in black, maybe marker. He traced it with his finger, but couldn’t discern what it meant.

* * *

  
  


It didn’t feel like ‘fucking’ at all. At least, not in the way Stiles had expected.

Peter went slow, gently fingering Stiles open, and kissed his lips swollen the whole time he was at it. They ended up settled on their sides, one of Peter’s hands cradled around Stiles’s chest, lips restless at the back of his neck as he pushed in. It felt so much more intimate than he had prepared for. The position didn’t allow for rough, fast fucking. Peter rocked against him in slow, languid motions that rubbed against all the right places until Stiles was arching and mewling, clutching at Peter’s hand on his chest with both of his own.

“You have to let go if you want me to touch you,” Peter murmured against his ear.

Stiles shook his head, grip tightening as he rolled his hips back. “Little longer,” he mumbled. “Want it to last a little longer.”

Peter kissed the skin below Stiles’s ear, then his shoulder. “Okay.”

* * *

  
  


Jackson sighed, leaning back against the edge of the hot tub, arms spread wide. “We needed this,” he declared, eyes closed behind his sunglasses. “We needed a vacation.”

Under the water, a foot bumped against his calf. “We take, like, three vacations a year,” Ethan reminded him in a dry tone.

Peeking an eye open as he lifted his head, Jackson said, “Yeah, and this is only the second this year.”

“It’s May.”

“Are you complaining or just being a smartass?”

Ethan grinned at him. “Not complaining.” He moved across the hot tub, settling in next to Jackson. “You really like this place, though? I would think it’s not really up to your usual standards.”

Jackson hummed, eyes scanning the courtyard, what little he could see from this corner of it. Their room was on the opposite side, 102, closer to the pool. The hot tub was mostly hidden away by foliage and the large arbor vitae tree in the center of the courtyard. It was meant to be secluded. “I do. You know, it’s not super high-end, but it has a sort of old fashioned elegance.”

“ _That_ ’s not to your usual standard,” Ethan pointed out, bumping his nose against Jackson’s cheek.

“Maybe I’m trying something new,” Jackson argued. “Maybe I’m trying to expand my tastes.” He turned and pressed his lips to Ethan’s.

“Not too much, I hope,” Ethan said against his lips.

Jackson swung a leg over Ethan’s lap, gripping the edge of the hot tub on either side of him as he kissed his husband again, longer and more thoroughly this time. Ethan ducked his head, pressing kisses to his throat. Jackson had closed his eyes, but when they fluttered open, he caught a bit of movement behind the shrubs, under the balcony. He frowned, leaning to the side to get a better look. It was shadowed there, in the back corner of the courtyard, but he saw the movement again.

Ethan took the tip of his head as an invitation to work his way down Jackson’s neck to his collarbone, teeth dragging against his skin. Jackson didn’t react, though, struggling to catch sight of whatever was back there.

There was a door, he realized, tucked in the corner. A room door, it looked like. As he was looking, a figure stepped in front of it, then turned. Jackson went stone-still.

Matt Dahler.

Ethan gave his hips a shake, pulling Jackson’s attention back down. “You alright?” he asked.

Jackson sucked in a breath. He smiled. “Fine,” he agreed, and leaned down for another kiss. Ethan stopped him short.

“You sure?” He looked cautious.

“I thought I saw something,” Jackson assured him. “It was just the light.”

* * *

  
  


Afterward, Peter and Stiles stayed spooned together, Stiles once again hugging Peter’s hand to his chest. He felt his mind go quiet, startled and settled all at once by how comfortable and right it felt. It was mid-afternoon, and he wasn’t remotely tired. Still, he thought about trying to feign sleep, coax Peter into a nap, just to prolong the moment.

Peter’s nose brushed against the back of his neck. “What are you thinking about?”

And instead of trying to dance around the subject or hide himself in excuses, Stiles just said it: “Stay.”

“Stay?”

Stiles rolled over to face Peter. “Stay in here with me,” he said. “Shack up. It’s vacation. What the hell, you know?”

Peter pulled their hands up, brushing his lips over the crest of Stiles’s knuckles. “Alright, I’ll stay.”

* * *

  
  


Chris walked down the balcony to 207. The sun was just setting over the edge of the roof, casting this corner of the hotel in shadow. His key slid smoothly into the lock, but wouldn’t turn. He jiggled it.

Then the handle turned under his grip, and Chris stepped back just in time for Jordan to push the door open. He watched his lips carefully, trying to read his words. ‘ _Tired_ ’ he caught. ‘ _Your room_.’

“Sorry, I don’t...” Chris said, frowning.

Jordan smiled patiently and took the key from the door lock. He placed it back in Chris’s hand, then pointed at the next door over, 206. The next words he mouthed carefully: “ _Get some sleep_.”

Chris nodded, blinking away his confusion. “Of course. Walked right past it,” he laughed. He went to 206. The lock turned with ease.

* * *

  
  


It still felt awful and lonely, waking up alone in his big king bed, but Scott felt better after talking with Isaac the day before. He felt a little less like he was losing his mind, at least. Besides, almost his whole pack was together now, immediate pack and extended. Their closeness settled him, made him feel like he was at home in a way he hadn’t felt for years.

He headed out of his room that morning, winding around the broad trunk of the hickory tree. Scott was trying to decide if he wanted sausage or bacon, when he heard a shaky sob from the direction of the pool.

He found Theo on a lounge chair, lying on his side with his fingers gripped tight around the edge. His shoulders were shaking, eyes red and face streaked with tears. They hadn’t gotten to know one another all that well before Theo had betrayed them and fled Beacon Hills all those years ago, but Scott had never seen Theo as the overly-weepy type.

Scott crouched beside the chair. “What’s going on?” He kept his voice soft.

Theo stared at him with swollen eyes, then turned away, rolling onto his back. His sobs took on a frantic, gasping pace, chest shaking with it. He sounded like he was about to hyperventilate.

“Come on,” Scott pleaded. “I know we’re not friends, but if something happened, if something’s wrong, you can tell me. I’ll help you.”

“Why?” Theo snapped, scrubbing at his eyes with both hands. “Why would you help me?”

Scott’s heart sank. Because, of course, it seemed so foreign to Theo that someone would help out of kindness, out of empathy, instead of loyalty or personal gain. How cold and lonely must it be to go through life like that? He shook his head. “Because you need help.”

Theo sat up and curled forward, elbows on his knees and temples clutched between his hands. He sniffled, shook his head. “You can’t help me,” he said, “and I wouldn’t deserve it if you could.”

Part of him wanted to keep pushing, to insist that Theo open up. But, really, how well did Theo know him? How well could he trust Scott? At the end of the day, he couldn’t force Theo to tell him. So Scott just said, “Come get breakfast with me?”

Theo turned to look at him, surprise evident on his puffy face.

“Sit with us today,” Scott offered.

Sniffing again, Theo wiped at his face. He nodded. “Alright.”

They were the first ones to the bar, but Theo helped him push together tables to make room for a big group. It took an unusually long time before Nora, the bartender, arrived at the side of the table with their food and drinks. Theo got toast, bacon, and a glass of straight whiskey.

“Sorry,” she said, “a bit short-staffed today.” She smiled at them both. Theo refused to look at her.

“No problem,” Scott assured her. Once she had left, he glanced down at his breakfast sandwich, a glass of orange juice beside it. “Theo, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I do want to help,” he offered one last time.

“It doesn’t matter,” Theo muttered. He downed the whiskey in one go.

* * *

  
  


Malia and Kira had been close in high school, back before Kira left, and they had rekindled that friendship as much as they could after she got back, during the infrequent visits that Malia made to Beacon Hills. It was a relief to have repaired it again.

“This one is your favorite?” Kira asked, stepping into the shade of the pecan and peach trees. She wore wide-legged white pants, cuffed up around her calves. Her pink blouse hung loosely on her, the neck gaping to show off her beaded turquoise necklace. Her clothes billowed in the breeze that came at their backs from the long alleyway of the hedges. As much as Malia felt a sense of belonging in this garden, she couldn’t help but think that Kira looked out of place. Still, she was smiling when she turned back to Malia. “I can see why,” she said. “It’s really beautiful, but not because anyone forced it to be.”

Malia felt herself relax. She hadn’t realized how much she had wanted Kira to approve of the garden. Maybe because it felt like she was approving of Malia by extension.

They took their time walking through. Malia climbed trees to fetch fruits and nuts for Kira to taste, and they both gathered berries and grapes. At one point, Kira stopped at a pear tree, its branches hanging low enough that pears could be plucked from the ground. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but Malia caught Kira’s hand before it could close around the fruit.

“No?” Kira asked. “They’re not good?”

Malia shook her head.

Eventually, the path wound around to the fire pit. It sat in the middle of a mossy clearing, the ground disturbed around the fire pit itself, baring black dirt beneath. Malia stared at it, frowning.

“Maybe we should start a fire!” Kira suggested, then looked at the sunlight peeking through the trees. “Or, no, maybe it’s too early in the day. You think we could bring the others out here later in the evening for a fire?”

The wind, which had been coming from the direction of the garden entrance, suddenly whipped up in a rush of rustling leaves and creaking branches. When it settled again, it was coming from the opposite direction, colder and stronger.

Malia felt something change, deep down inside of herself. It was a sort of certainty. She felt marked. Doomed. Something terrible was about to happen.

She turned to Kira and, on impulse, reached for her turquoise necklace.

“What?” Kira sputtered in surprise. “Malia, are you – ”

Her fingers found the knot at the back of Kira’s neck and loosened them so the necklace came away in her hands. Malia held it up to her own neck with a pleading expression and, god, she wished she could just say what she wanted, say why this was important.

Why couldn’t she just say it?

Kira seemed to understand, though. At least a little. “You want to put it on?” she asked.

Malia nodded and turned so Kira could get at the laces. She knotted it tightly around Malia’s throat.

* * *

  
  


While the others all found their favorite haunts in the gardens or courtyard – Stiles and Peter seemed to have picked their room for the past week – Jordan found that he liked the lobby. It had wide open archways that looked out into the courtyard, full view of the door into the bar. The couches set into the corner were a bit stiff, but comfortable enough to sit and get some reading done while he watched the comings and goings of his friends and the staff.

Vacation usually felt like it went by too fast, but this one had been long and lazy so far. No running around to see the sights, no events to mark the passage of days. Just comfort and rest.

Jordan was halfway through an old book of poetry he’d found in his room when he felt a sudden burning sensation in his chest. He sat up, set his feet on the ground, and tapped his chest with the side of his fist.

What at first had felt like heartburn morphed into a strange sort of awareness. The hairs on his arms stood on end. His palms began to sweat. His pulse raced. Something was coming.

The front doors swung open, a dazzling glare of sunlight spilling into the lobby, obscuring the two figures that followed it in.

“Welcome to the Hornbeam Hotel,” said the attendant. The sunlight spilled all around him on the front desk, but it never touched his face. “Mr. Hale, Ms. Martin,” he said, “we’ve been expecting you.”

The doors shut, leaving Derek and Lydia in sudden shadow. Derek went for the desk, but Lydia turned and looked at Jordan. “Oh my god, you’re here,” she said.

Jordan rose from his seat and walked toward her. The warmth in his chest had settled the moment he saw her.

“We were so worried,” she said. “Are the others here?”

Jordan gave her a big, friendly smile and nodded toward the front desk. “You should get checked in,” he told her. “I’m glad you two could make it.”

She gaped at him, but Jordan turned and walked back to the couch and his poetry. He settled down and opened the book again to read:

“ _Now I sit content, the vulture circling,  
Avalanche of rolling thunder apace,  
You speak to me, lacking man's deceiving,  
Truthfully, yet with an austere face._

_Stern goddess, savage and intense,  
You, dearest friend, try to advance;  
And point to where the vulture descends,  
Daring me to deny you amid the rumbling avalanche."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poem is an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “To Melancholy”.
> 
> Next chapter, we will have some sweet, sweet exposition and explanations!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theo explains the hotel to Malia. Lydia struggles to save her friends, who don't know they need saving.

She watched Jordan walk away from her, apparently unaware of her distress. The hotel was tugging on the edges of her own mind, trying to coax her into that same blissful obliviousness. It felt wrong to resist it, but felt familiar, too. After all, Lydia had spent the past ten years making peace with the unsettling voices in her head.

_ Dying _ , they said now,  _ they’re dying. _

At the front desk, the attendant watched her carefully, so she pasted on a bland, pleasant expression as she and Derek accepted their room keys. Lydia waited until they stepped into the courtyard before asking in a low tone, “Derek, are you still with me?”

He turned to her, smiling but with a little knot of confusion between his brows. “What do you mean?”

“Where do you think we are?” she tried.

Derek laughed. “We’re on vacation, Lydia.”

Her heart sank, but she returned his smile and nodded. She was alone, then.

_ They’re dying. _

The whole place was practically vibrating with whispers, the screams and moans of the dead echoing through the chasm of the courtyard. A long, in-ground swimming pool sat close to the lobby, and she could see shadows swirling and lurking below. Then, suddenly, four creatures broke the surface: gray-black ghouls with rotting flesh, teeth bared and snarling below yellowed eyes as they clawed their way over the edge of the pool. Lydia jumped, grabbed at Derek’s arm.

He didn’t notice. On the other end of the pool, Scott and Isaac were treading water, splashing one another, completely oblivious.

Lydia’s pulse hammered in her chest, but she held it together, tried not to react. They had to go around the pool to get to their rooms. A familiar-looking groundskeeper stood at the end of it, watering the flowers. As she tried to place his face, it transformed before her eyes, going white and gaunt, cheeks hollowing out, eyes rolling back and sinking in, his jaw stretching into a long, silent scream.

“Are you alright?” Derek asked.

_ They’re dying _ .

She was shaking.

The specter-gardener waved at her. “Welcome to the Arbor Vitae Hotel,” he said.

“The what?” she asked, but her voice came out a whisper.

_ They’re dying. _

His face changed back. His name tag said ‘Josh.’ Josh Diaz, she realized.

“Alright,” Derek said, “it looks like this is your room.” He had stopped in front of room 103. “Mine is the next one over. You should get some rest.”

Lydia offered a brittle smile in return. “Thanks,” she agreed, and slipped the key into the lock with trembling hands.

_ Malia _ . As she opened the door, the sense of her overwhelmed Lydia. She could feel her. Feel her dying. Every person here.  _ Dying, dying, dying. We’ll take them. They’re ours.  _ The whole place was saturated, screaming with death, with agony,  _ evil _ . She closed the door behind her and looked around the simple, innocuous-looking hotel room.

Lydia dropped to her knees and screamed.

* * *

_ The attendant had an unsettling gaze, too intense. His dark, unblinking eyes didn’t match the pleasant smile below. “You see,” he said, “Mr. Raeken tried to pull one over on you. But you can get him back.” _

_ Malia stood at the front desk, eyes fixed on the man across from her. “What do I need to do?” _

_ “You don’t need to do anything,” he answered, “but there is a cost.” He reached beneath the desk and brought out an odd metal device. Studying it, Malia realized that it was an old-fashioned microphone, the kind singers used in black-and-white movies. “Your voice,” the attendant said. _

Malia woke with a noisy gasp, jerking forward and finding that she couldn’t move more than a few inches before something sharp and cold dug into her wrists. She looked up, startled, to find that her wrists were clasped in thick metal manacles, chained to a stone wall.

“ _ Please _ tell me you can talk now,” said a voice to her side.

Her head whipped around to see Theo, chained to the wall beside her. They were in a small alcove, barely big enough for the two of them, each seated on the stone floor with their arms chained, extended over their heads. Both of them wore clothes that were little more than decaying rags. “Where the fuck are we?” she snarled.

Theo gave a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank god. I can’t imagine being stuck down here with you still pulling the mute act.”

“Theo,  _ where are we _ ?” she demanded.

“We’re in the hotel.” He looked up at the dark, dripping ceiling above. “The basement, I’m guessing.”

A very small amount of light leeched in from the entrance to the alcove, but she couldn’t see anything outside except for another plain, stone wall. “You better start explaining right now,” she growled.

“Or you’ll do what?” he laughed. He looked up at the chains on her arms. “Not exactly in a position to be making threats, are you?”

Malia bared her teeth, eyes flashing. “My feet aren’t chained. I’ll strangle you with my legs if I have to.”

Theo snorted. “I guess I could have gotten stuck with a more boring execution-mate.”

“A  _ what _ ?”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Fuck, how do I even start explaining?” He shook his head. “This place? It’s not really a hotel. It’s not really a place. It’s a demon.”

She squinted at him. “Like… it’s possessed by a demon?”

“No, like it  _ is a demon _ . The whole building. All of the staff, everything. It’s thousands of years old. They had records of it back to the third century BC, but there are some ancient Dravidian stories that put it even older than that – ”

“Who had records?” Malia cut in.

“The Dread Doctors.”

She gaped at him.

“They told me about this place,” he explained. “Or… I mean, this  _ thing _ , I guess. They studied it because of the way it manipulates time and space. It always manifests as a hotel or an inn. It appears in random locations, all over the world, and lures in guests. Then it vanishes again.”

“So it… what, it eats people?”

“It’s doing something with us,” he agreed, huffing a humorless laugh. “It has this weird time cycle. The past few sightings have been eleven years apart, but before that it was thirteen. There was a story in the eighties about two people who had been captured by it in the seventies. They escaped eleven years later, the same age they were when they went in.”

Malia tried to get her head around that, around what the hell that  _ meant _ for them. It meant it was possible to escape, at least. “So why have us stay at a hotel?” she pressed. “And why take us down here now? Did we do something to piss it off?”

Theo sighed and leaned his head back against the wall, eyes closed. “Not exactly.”

* * *

Jackson and Ethan’s room on the third floor had a beautiful view of the courtyard, but it was also an awful trek down to the bar when they wanted food.

“C’mon,” Jackson pouted, dragging a finger down Ethan’s side. “You can’t expect  _ me _ to go get the food after that. I can’t even feel my legs.”

Ethan groaned and sat up, looking down at his whiny, gorgeous husband. He was sprawled across their bed, naked and grinning, one hand splayed over his stomach. “You’re lucky I love you,” Ethan informed him, then leaned down for a kiss.

Jackson grinned against his lips. “I am.”

So he got up and pulled on some pants and a t-shirt, not even bothering with shoes as he slipped out of their room onto the balcony. It was early in the evening, the sky just starting to go pink and lilac over the roof of the hotel, the air starting to chill. The wrought iron stairs were cold under his bare feet, the grooves of the metal digging uncomfortably into them as he made his way down. At the second floor balcony, a loud creak stopped him short.

Ethan turned. There was a room door there that he hadn’t noticed before, which seemed strange – it was right behind the stairs. Room 203. The door stood ajar, the room inside all in shadow.

_ “Ethan _ ,” said a soft voice, almost a laugh, and he recognized it at once in the way it gripped his heart.

Aiden.

He stepped onto the balcony, taking slow steps toward the open door.

“ _ Is that you?” _ Aiden asked. “ _ Oh my god, is that really you?” _

“It’s me,” Ethan said, grinning. He reached for the doorknob.

A sharp female voice cut through the moment: “Ethan!”

He spun and saw Lydia, standing halfway up the stairs, her eyes wide.

“That’s _ not _ Aiden,” she said, her voice firm but pleading.

Ethan looked back at room 203, but the door had closed.

* * *

“The hotel has a set capacity,” Theo explained. “Eleven rooms. Well, there’s actually thirteen, but two of them are… there’s something wrong with them.”

“Wrong how?”

“No one stays in them. Scott went into one of them the day he and Kira broke up. Chris went into the other when he went deaf. Anyway, the other eleven are all occupied by guests, and they’re  _ always _ full. When someone new comes to the hotel, the person who’s been in their room the longest gets bumped, and the new person takes their room.”

Malia was trying to keep up, but her mind caught on the idea that Chris had gone  _ deaf _ after going into one of the rooms. Which, of course, led her to – “They took my voice,” she gasped.

“Yeah,” Theo snapped, impatient. “God, it was bad enough you couldn’t figure it out while you were up there.”

The memories came rushing up at her like glimpses of old photographs. Things she had forgotten. “No,” she said, “I gave it to them. I traded it for my room. For  _ your _ room.”

Theo glared. “Yeah, I figured that much out. I still don’t know how that all went down.”

“How the hell did I not notice that I couldn’t  _ talk _ ?” Malia demanded.

Thoroughly exasperated, Theo groaned and yanked at his chains. “That’s what this place  _ does, _ Malia. It fucks with your perceptions, your memories. It makes you forget things and not think about things. You’re missing the point.”

“Why mess with us?” she cut in. “Why keep us up there and not just eat us?”

“I… don’t really know,” he admitted. “I mean, demons have rules. Besides, it’s not like it’s leaving us alone while we’re staying up there. It messes with people. Maybe feeding off their fear? And then there’s the staff...”

“The staff?”

Theo looked impatient again as he urged, “Try to remember. Nora? The bartender? She was a guest when you first arrived. Josh? Tracy?”

Another surge of memories flooded Malia’s mind, these ones of soft, mossy earth and sunlight trickling through a canopy of trees, a crackling fire. Tracy, sprawled out below her.

“Tracy,” she breathed. Malia shook her head. No. There was  _ no way _ she would just forget about that, would just let the hotel  _ take Tracy _ . “I was with her,” she recalled, “right before it took her. And then she… she gave me my laundry, and I didn’t even remember who she was.”

“It wasn’t her,” Theo told her. “The things up there wearing their faces, it’s not them. It’s the demon.”

“Then where is she?” Malia demanded.

Theo glared at her, then tipped his head back to shout, “Tracy! Josh!”

Malia heard their answering voices, distorted by distance, the echo of stones, and rage. She couldn’t even make out the words, just shouts of agony and fury.

“They’re not too happy with me these days,” Theo sighed.

“It was wearing your face,” Malia recalled. “You were the waiter.”

“And you’re up there doing god-knows-what now, too,” he sighed.

* * *

Derek took a nap, once he got settled into his room, and woke in the dark of night. He turned on the lamp on the bedside table, casting the room in a warm orange glow. An odd, restless sort of feeling had stirred in his mind, like he had just been dreaming but let it slip away.

The night air was cold, so he pulled on a sweater from the laundry bag, still resting at the foot of his bed. It fit a little too snugly in the shoulders, but it was warm enough. When he stepped out of his room, the courtyard was dimly lit by lanterns hanging between each of the rooms. Once he got around the swimming pool, he saw a solitary lamppost in the center of the courtyard, near the hornbeam tree.

On the bench below the tree, half in shadow and half in light, sat Jordan. He wore a canvas jacket, military green with the collar raised around his neck. Derek’s nose wrinkled at an unexpected yet familiar scent as he approached from behind the bench.

“Are you smoking?” he asked, surprised.

Jordan jumped, spinning to face Derek while shoving one of his hands down to hide it under the bench. “What? No!” he spluttered.

He looked so much like a teenager caught by his parents, Derek couldn’t help but laugh. “You know I can’t ground you, right?”

Flushing, Jordan lifted his hand, a burning cigarette pinched between two fingers. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Derek commented, nodding toward the bench for permission.

Jordan slid to one side. “I quit after I moved to Beacon Hills,” he explained. “The Sheriff helped. He used to give me extra paperwork if he caught me sneaking them behind the station.”

Derek caught himself smiling at the mental image that created. “So what’s got you off the wagon?”

Reaching into his jacket pocket, Jordan withdrew a white cigarette package with a purple band around the middle. “Found it in the drawer of the nightstand in my room,” he explained. “You want one?”

Derek hesitated. He had smoked a little in New York, during his brief attempt at a college education, but it was more of a social thing than an actual enjoyment for them. It was a good excuse to stay out here, though. “Sure,” he agreed, holding out his hand as Jordan shook a cigarette loose. Derek put it between his lips, then accepted the lighter from the other pocket of the jacket.

They both sat on the bench, quietly smoking in the shadow of the tree. Derek had always liked Jordan, liked his steady hand and quick smile. He was easy to like. 

“You wanna walk in the gardens?” Derek asked, glancing over at him.

Jordan raised an eyebrow, then looked up at the starry sky peeking between the branches of the hornbeam. “You think it’s a good idea? This late at night?”

“Hm,” Derek said. “You’re right. Could be dangerous. Maybe if we had an officer of the law with us.”

That won him a sudden laugh, Jordan’s hands darting quickly to take the cigarette from his mouth before it fell. “Alright, alright,” he agreed.

* * *

“You said there was a specific order,” Malia recalled, trying to picture the layout of the hotel in her mind. “It took Tracy, then Josh on the third floor. Then you, then me.”

Theo nodded, tired. “Before Tracy, it was Rachana in 207. Before her, Nora in 206.”

Malia’s brow furrowed. “When Kira moved into her own room – it took Nora then.”

“And when Peter moved into Stiles’s room, it let me come back up,” Theo reminded her. “I haven’t really figured out the details on how double occupancy works here, but it broke Scott and Kira up for a reason. It wanted her in her own room.”

She chewed on her lip and shifted. Her fingers were starting to go a little numb from the way her wrists pressed into the manacles. “You said it went in order of who arrived last. Are you sure about that? Or does it go by room number? Because Scott and Kira arrived at the same time.”

“It’s bad news either way,” Theo muttered.

“What do you mean?”

He groaned, as if teaching Malia about their impending death was more inconvenient than the imprisonment and death itself. “Just  _ think _ , Malia. It feeds on a person’s essence, their power, and uses that power to sustain the hotel, even to expand it. It tries to lure in powerful people, but usually it would be limited by, I don’t know, whoever the hell wanders in the door. Why do you think it wanted your voice?”

Malia felt her chest tighten at the realization.

“It has your phone, your voice,” Theo continued. “A whole contacts list of supernatural heavy-hitters. You gave it an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“Holy shit,” she whispered.

“Whether it takes Scott or Kira next…” Theo shook his head. “Just imagine what it could do with the power of a true alpha or an immortal kitsune.”

* * *

“So he hands me these, like, those little pads you use to keep furniture from scuffing the floor? And he says, ‘Yeah, all of the pro basketball stars use them to run faster.’”

Derek groaned in secondhand embarrassment, covering his face with his hands even as he laughed. “No, you  _ didn’t _ !”

Jordan grinned. “He says, ‘Michael Jordan uses them! You just stick ‘em on the bottom of your shoes, and you can just  _ zip _ across the floor.’”

Derek’s laugh drifted down the long tunnel of hedges, vanishing into the thick foliage. “Please tell me you tried them out during practice at least.”

“You kidding? No way, I saved them for our first game,” Jordan said. “Took two whole steps onto the court, and slipped right onto my face in front of everyone. Broke my nose and bit through my bottom lip. There was blood everywhere. I was screaming. My dad had to pick me up and carry me out of the gym.”

“So that was the end of your basketball career?” Derek asked, eyes crinkling in the corners.

Jordan nodded. “Yep. But once I got to middle school, that’s when football started. That’s the big sport in Iowa anyway.”

An owl hooted softly as they stepped into the second garden, the entrance framed by orange trees. Derek plucked one off a low-hanging branch, immediately digging a thumb in at the base to peel it. “I don’t think Beacon Hills has ever had a decent football team,” he said. “Lacrosse was big when I was in school, but it’s… y’know, aggressive. My parents didn’t want me playing.” There were a few strings of light wrapped around wrought iron arches over the path, but most of the light came from the moon, hanging high above them. Large sheets of copper hung between the arches, leaf and flower shapes imprinted on the edges.

“I’ve seen pictures of you from when you were on the basketball team,” Jordan told him, smirking. “You were...” He trailed off, clearly struggling for an appropriate descriptor.

“Oh god,” Derek laughed, discarding half the orange peel onto the grass. “That bad?”

“No, you were cute!”

“ _ Cute _ ?”

“With the little shorts and all.” Jordan bumped their shoulders together.

Derek held out an orange slice, and Jordan took it. “Like you have room to talk, Deputy Hot Pants.”

“Deputy  _ what _ ?” Jordan’s laugh was loud in the quiet of the night. It seemed to surround them with a sort of warmth, a blanket of security.

Shrugging a shoulder, Derek popped an orange slice into his mouth. It was just barely more sweet than it was sour, just on the right side of ripeness. “I have it on good authority that’s what the women of Beacon Hills call you.”

“ _ Whose _ good authority?” Jordan demanded, still grinning. He shoved playfully at Derek’s shoulder. Suddenly they were facing one another, standing in the center of the garden. They were closer than he had meant for them to get, and the orange was sweet on Jordan’s breath, twisted up with the bitter nicotine in just the right way. Jordan licked his lips, and Derek realized he was staring at his mouth. But, then, Jordan’s eyes were flicking down to his, too. 

He was about to step in and close the gap when Jordan’s gaze moved past him, to the side, and he jolted in surprise, a frown suddenly appearing on his face.

Derek turned around and saw their reflection in one of the sheets of copper. For a moment, it looked normal. Him, Jordan, and the glare of the moon. Then, before his eyes, Jordan’s reflection grew taller, broader and darker. Bright, fiery points of light shone where his eyes had been, and his mouth spread into a snarl of jagged teeth. Derek spun back around and saw Jordan, just regular Jordan, standing there with his gaze still fixed on their reflection.

“We should probably go,” Jordan murmured. He finally looked at Derek again. Whatever had been there, that heat of possibility, it had vanished.

* * *

Scott woke up early, a restless energy wriggling up his spine. He hadn’t really bothered with working out while on vacation, but he suddenly felt the need. The air was still cool when he stepped out of his room in his swim trunks and the pool water, the sort of cold that jolted him into movement immediately.

He was only two laps in when he first saw it: a shadow just out of the corner of his eye. It was like someone swimming beside and just behind him, a movement in the water. But when he surfaced, there was nothing.

It happened again on the fifth lap, but he tried to ignore it and the creeping sense of unease it sent through him. It dogged him through the sixth and seventh lap until, unnerved, Scott swam to the side of the pool to get out.

He set his hands on the tile beside the pool, but before he could push up, something clasped around his ankle and yanked him downward.

Scott thrashed against it, desperately grasping for the side of the pool but finding nothing but open water. He tried to swim up, forward, but it was strong, whatever it was. He managed to break the surface, just long enough to scream, “Help!” before he was under again. The next time he surfaced, he saw Josh, the gardener, standing beside the pool with the hose, watering the roses. “Help!” but Josh didn’t so much as look up.

It seemed to be playing with him, allowing him to surface just long enough for a breath, and then holding him down until his chest burned. He came up once and saw Chris standing on the balcony, but he wasn’t looking at Scott and couldn’t hear him screaming.

Then he was under again, and the water was going darker, colder. Scott felt further away from the surface than before, his lungs burning. Down there, in the darkness, he remembered being small, in the midst of an asthma attack. His chest had felt caved-in the way it did now, so he could hardly draw in enough breath to scream for his mom.

A hand closed around his wrist, and suddenly he was breaking the surface again, hauled up over the side of the pool as he gasped in frantic breaths.

“Scott!”

It was Lydia, one hand still clutched around his wrist, the other stroking his face.

“Scott, breathe. Come on, slow breaths. Just like that. There you go. Can you pull yourself out?”

He nodded with some effort, limbs moving sluggishly as she caught him under the armpits and helped him out over the side of the pool. Then Scott was laying flat on his back, staring up at the blue sky and Lydia’s worry-creased face hovering over him.

Lydia?

Scott grinned up at her. “When did you get here?”

“Are you okay?” she asked. She reached down and pulled his feet out of the water.

Sitting up, Scott shook the water from his hair. “I’m great. Better now that you’re here. God, when’s the last time we were all together like this?”

“Scott, you were just – ” He looked up at her. Lydia stood beside him in a knee-length green dress that buttoned down the front. She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. In a soft voice, she said, “It’s really nice seeing you, too.” Then she looked away, blinking quickly and biting her lip.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Before she could answer, a voice called out from across the courtyard. “Hey!” Isaac jogged toward them, wearing swim trunks with a towel slung over his shoulder. “You’re not done swimming, are you? I was just gonna jump in.”

“No, I’m not done,” Scott agreed.

Lydia gave an odd little gasp, but when he looked at her, she only said, “I’m gonna get some breakfast. Do you want to eat first?”

Scott shook his head. “Nah, I’m all wet. We’ll catch up with you later, though, alright?”

Scrubbing a hand over her face, Lydia nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, alright.”

* * *

Their room thrummed with a hungry sort of energy. It reeked of sweat, of sex. The air hung heavy and warm in a way that felt both comforting and suffocating. Stiles gripped at Peter’s thighs, just above the knees, as he sank back onto his cock with a groan. It went so easy now, even as his sore muscles ached in protest. Peter’s hands stroked over his ass, his hips, wrapping around his waist to steady him.

They’d been at it for days. Stiles didn’t even know how many days. The maid, Rachana, had been bringing their meals. It had been a steady stream of fucking, sleeping, fucking, eating, then fucking again.

“God, Peter, you feel so good,” Stiles gasped. His hands slipped on the sweat on Peter’s legs, and he braced them on the bed between his legs as he rocked back.

“You should see yourself like this,” Peter purred. His thumbs wandered down, brushing over the tender skin where Stiles was wrapped around his cock. Peter planted his feet on the bed, and a moment later, Stiles felt his hips rise up, pressing him deeper. 

His mouth fell open, eyes fluttering shut. “Yes,” Stiles gasped. “Please, more.”

They rocked together slowly, Stiles’s arms trembling beneath him. His muscles felt wrung-out. Just as he was starting to think that they wouldn’t hold him up anymore, Peter’s hand snaked around his middle, tugging him backward until Stiles was laying flat with his back to Peter’s chest. The new angle pressed Peter’s cock perfectly against his prostate. A ragged moan shivered into the hazy air, though Stiles couldn’t say which of them had made it. Both of them, maybe. Or maybe it was the room itself.

Peter got a hand around him, though, jerking Stiles off in long, firm strokes while Stiles could do little more than writhe back onto his cock.

His lips felt dry. His throat, too. Stiles couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten up for a drink of water, but even with his eyes closed, he could remember every detail of the ceiling over this bed. “Peter,” he rasped, and begged Peter to understand everything behind it: the pleasure, the confusion, the fear. They were getting lost in here, in this room.

Stiles tipped into orgasm with a long, low groan that ended on a sob. “Peter,” he choked out.

Peter kissed at his neck, hips moving in short, sharp motions as he rocked up into him. “I know,” he whispered. “I know, Stiles. I can’t – god, I can’t stop either. I can’t – ”

He stilled, arms hugging tight around Stiles’s middle as he came.

Stiles rolled off of him, flopping face-down onto the bed. He felt a hand slip into his own and squeeze. 

“I don’t know what this is,” Peter whispered.

But the feelings of concern were already starting to melt away, like they always did. “Fuck, I’m tired,” Stiles murmured. His eyes were starting to slide shut when there was a sharp knock at the door. He felt himself perk up, just a bit. “Room service,” he sighed contentedly.

He got up and grabbed a robe off the end of the bed, fastening it around his waist before he opened the door. Only, it wasn’t the maid outside their door.

“Lydia?” Stiles felt his lips spreading into a grin.

She glanced past him, then quickly averted her eyes, obviously getting a view she hadn’t expected. “Um, can we talk for a minute?” she asked. “It’s important.”

Even though he was the one that had opened the door, it felt a bit like Lydia had been the one to open it for him. Stiles felt an odd sense of relief as he nodded and stepped outside. The cool morning air rushed over him at once, clearing a haze that had been stuck fast to his skin.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Stiles agreed quickly. “Yeah, I’m fine. What’s going on?”

Lydia sucked in a deep breath. “Alright, I know you’re not going to believe me. And I know it’s going to be, I don’t know,  _ difficult _ to understand me, but I need you to trust me. Because I really, really need your help. Okay?”

Stiles frowned. After all they had been through, what could she possibly think there was left that he wouldn’t believe? That he wouldn’t help her with? “Lydia, what is it?”

She wrapped a hand around his wrist, gripping tightly, and looked him in the eye with a pleading intensity. “There is something wrong with this hotel,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: imprisonment, including being chained up. More drowning. Slight dub-con: Stiles and Peter are in a consensual sexual relationship with one another, but the hotel is compelling them to lose track of time so they have sex to the point of exhaustion.
> 
> Next chapter: Stiles and Lydia are on the case!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lydia tries to convince Stiles that the hotel is evil. Meanwhile, the hotel is making allies of its own.

Every question Lydia asked made Stiles look more and more ready to burrow into the earth to hide from her. He, like the rest of the pack, seemed to have a visceral aversion to looking too closely at his surroundings. So, naturally, she waited until they were well into the maze, where he couldn’t escape, before getting at the _really_ difficult ones.

“Who was staying in my room before?” she demanded.

Stiles flung his hands out rather dramatically and stalked off away from her. “I don’t know! Some girl, I think? I wasn’t really paying attention?” He dropped onto the ground beneath a weeping willow.

“You weren’t paying attention or you can’t remember?” Lydia pestered, keeping right after him. There was a low stone wall near the willow. She leaned against it and folded her arms over her chest. “Stiles, you said you were going to trust me.”

“I trust you,” Stiles insisted. “I just… I mean, this all seems a little…”

She lifted an eyebrow, challenging him to finish that sentence – _a little crazy_ – but knowing that he would not. He knew better. “Like we haven’t done cursed hotels before?” she reminded him. This was all just a bit too reminiscent of their ill-fated stay at the Glen Capri.

“That motel wasn’t cursed,” Stiles reminded her. “It was the wolfsbane poisoning from coach’s whistle.”

“What it _was_ ,” Lydia argued, “was a situation where _I_ knew something was wrong and I was right. Which is exactly what this situation is. Now, do you remember any of the rooms ever being empty?”

Detail by excruciatingly extracted detail, she was starting to put together some patterns. Their rooms were almost in the order in which they had arrived. Derek was even in the room before hers, and he had walked through the door before her. There were a few strange anomalies, though.

“No,” Stiles sighed. “Why would there be empty rooms?”

“Because normal hotels aren’t at full capacity all the time,” she answered, sighing when it looked like Stiles didn’t quite believe her. “After Kira and Scott split, she went into room 205?”

“Yes,” he snapped. Then he frowned and rubbed at his face. “No. Wait, no, she…” Stiles got up and started to pace. “She went to 206,” he said, looking a little queasy. His shoes sank in the marshy grass, squelching as he walked. “She moved to 205…” He stopped short. “Peter was in 205. She moved when he moved into my room.”

Lydia closed her eyes, picturing the layout of rooms in her mind. “So then Chris moved to 206 – was he in 207 before? Jordan in 301?”

“Yeah,” Stiles agreed, sounding horrified. “God, how did I not even… Jordan was on the third floor. I didn’t even realize he’d moved. Why would they shift?”

“Rooms can’t be left empty,” Lydia concluded. “It’s a rule in this place. Now what I really want to know is why Kira got a room out of order, but everyone else had to shuffle down when you and Peter shacked up. And _who_ filled in the extra room?”

* * *

  
  


Derek lay in a lounge chair next to the pool, mind going hazy as the sun streamed down on him from above. He kept slipping in and out of dreams: one moment, next to the pool; the next, standing on a desert road staring at the hotel from afar.

“ _I don’t like it,” Braeden said._

He stirred again, a rush of wind rustling the leaves of the arbor vitae tree.

_Lydia stood in front of him, hands on her hips as she stared down the building, its high, impossibly green hedges standing in stark contrast to the desert around them. “Well, if you don’t like it, I hate it,” she declared._

Soft laughter drifted across the courtyard from one of the balconies.

“ _We could try to scale the hedges,” Derek suggested._

_Braeden shook her head. “They’re supernatural in origin. Who knows what nasties could come out at you while you’re all the way up top.”_

“ _So, what, we just walk in the front door?” Lydia asked._

_Derek’s eyes caught on a corner of the hedges, Lydia’s voice drifting into the back of his awareness. He crept forward to get a better look. Smoke rose from it, just a little at first, then more until the whole corner of the hedges lit up in flames. Derek leaped back out of the way as the hedges rapidly disintegrated into flames, revealing a building very different from the hotel._

_His house. His family’s house. Burning. He could hear screams inside, the creaking of rafters as the roof began to cave in._

“ _No,” he pleaded, eyes watering. “No, no…”_

Derek jolted awake, eyes wide and heart thundering behind his ribs. At first, he couldn’t see past the glare of sun, but his eyes slowly settled on a figure standing in the shadows on the second floor balcony. Chris stared down at him with an unsettling awareness. He looked like he knew something.

Pushing himself out of the lounge chair, Derek kept his eyes fixed on Chris. They hadn’t talked since he’d arrived at the hotel. He motioned to the stairs, that he was coming up.

As he started across the courtyard, around the arbor vitae, something dark moved in the corner of his vision, in the back corner opposite the stairs. Derek hesitated, then stepped to the other side of the tree, toward the hot tub.

There, in the shade of the balcony, stood a black wolf.

Derek stood still for a long moment, waiting for the vision to disappear. Instead, the wolf turned twice in place, then jerked its head toward the back corner.

“Mom?” Derek whispered.

The wolf flashed red eyes and gave a little yip before bounding off toward a door Derek hadn’t noticed before. A room door. 105. It stood ajar, and the wolf slipped inside.

Derek chased after, grinning, and pushed the door open.

It wasn’t his mother he found.

Boyd stood just inside the door, his clothes wet, blood frothing on his lips.

Derek tried to step back, but his back hit a closed door. Looking to his left, he saw Erica sprawled across the hotel bed, mouth agape and eyed fogged with death. At least, he had thought so, but a moment later she gave a sharp, labored gasp for air, breaths rattling past her lips as she rasped, “Derek.”

He rushed to her, kneeling beside the bed and pressing his hands to her face. “Please,” he begged. “Please, just hold on. I’ll get you some help. Boyd, you have to –”

When he turned, Boyd was gone. In his place, Laura stood in front of the door, holding hands with their little brother, Tyler. He was still only six years old, the age he had been when he died in the fire.

“What happened to them?” Tyler asked, looking up at Laura.

“He thought he could be an alpha,” Laura explained. “And look what happened.”

“No, I didn’t – it wasn’t like that –” Derek protested.

Tyler kept his eyes on Laura. “After he killed me?” he said. “He thought he could be an alpha after he killed me?”

Derek choked on the hurt that curled in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he pleaded. “I didn’t know what else to do. I never wanted it. I wasn’t ready. I thought if I –”

“Don’t pick on the boy, Laura,” his father scolded from next to the window. Smoke poured from his mouth as he spoke.

A hand closed over his shoulder, squeezing. Derek looked up, and saw his mother sitting on the bed, human, her eyes glowing red. “It’s alright, Derek,” she told him. “You were never meant for that. We never meant for you to be a leader, sweetheart.” She stroked her fingers over his cheek, smiling at him with all of the warmth and affection he remembered. “You have so many wonderful gifts. That just wasn’t one of them.”

His voice cracked as he spoke, thick with emotion. “You all left me alone,” he said. “Mom, I needed you. I needed you to tell me what to do.” Kneeling there on the floor of that hotel room, tears slipping down his nose, he felt broken in two.

“I know, baby.” She stroked his hair. “I’m here now. I can tell you what to do.”

* * *

  
  


For one beautiful moment there, Lydia had thought that maybe – just maybe – she had Stiles convinced. But as soon as the moment had come, it was gone, and he was back to denial and forgetfulness.

“Are you bored?” he asked, a cruel sort of mockery to his tone that hadn’t been directed her way in years. “Is that what this is? You’re stuck at MIT with your boring, human professor friends and their boring, human problems? You’ve got classes full of socially inept freshmen who think that being on the spectrum means they’re Will Hunting and you’re so bored with it that your idea of vacation is a haunted hotel?”

Lydia tuned him out and resolved that, once she had gotten them all out of this mess, she was going to make Stiles buy her some very expensive, very impractical shoes as an apology.

They were heading back toward the hotel, retracing their steps through the gardens. She had been more focused on their conversation than the gardens themselves on the way in. Now, though, she stopped short as they stepped into the next. The pathway was made of large, flat orange bricks. Around it, pale sand was broken up by scatterings of colored stones, cactus and succulents. Large stone archways and platforms decorated the expanse of the garden.

She frowned, staring off past one of the weathered stone walls. She walked toward it, climbing over the wall to get a closer look. There, in the sand, two flowers jutted up on long stalks. At the base of the stem, long fronds atop a shaggy trunk of dried-out leaves.

“Lydia?” Stiles trailed after her. He stared at the flowers for a long moment, maybe hoping that he’d see something not immediately apparent. Finally, he asked, “What, are the plants haunted?”

“ _Yucca elata_ ,” she told him. “Soaptree yucca. It evolved long flower stems so that it wouldn’t be buried by shifting sand dunes.”

Stiles gave it another good look, then glanced at her and tucked his hands into his pockets. “Is this one that you grow at home?”

Lydia laughed quietly. “That would be impossible. You couldn’t grow these outside of a greenhouse in Massachusetts.” When Stiles didn’t immediately figure out why that would bother her (and, damn it, she was really missing having another quick mind on the case with her), Lydia snapped at him, “Stiles! Two gardens back, there’s a garden full of plants that grow in boggy moor conditions. Weeping willows, cottongrass, marsh reeds! There’s no way that those plants could be growing outdoors in the same environment as these!”

He just stared at her. Like she was crazy. He was going to buy her shoes _and_ a dress.

“Look around you, Stiles! We’re in a desert! There’s cactus growing here! The last garden, those were North African plants. And the next one…”

Growling in frustration, she grabbed his hand and dragged him through the garden just short of a run. They went down the gloomy, shadowed passage of the hedges, impossibly tall on either side of them, then stepped into a garden straight out of Japan’s Edo period, complete with cherry blossoms and a koi pond.

Lydia spun to glare at his bewildered face, more furious than she meant to get. “This doesn’t make any sense, Stiles!”

“It’s a garden, Lydia,” he said softly.

“It’s a maze,” she replied. “Where does the maze end, Stiles? Do you know?”

Stiles furrowed his brow. “Why would a maze end?”

* * *

  
  


“ _Stop staring at the stewardess’s ass,” Jackson whispered, a little too loud._

_Isaac rammed an elbow at his chest. “They liked to be called flight attendants now.”_

_Jackson smirked. “They still don’t like having their asses stared at.”_

_Leaning back in his seat, Isaac shot the woman a smile when she turned around. He sniffed the air for her reaction. “She might,” he said quietly._

“ _If you two are going to snipe at each other the whole flight, I’m moving to coach,” Ethan muttered, shifting a neck pillow around on his shoulders._

“ _He doesn’t mean that,” Jackson assured Isaac. “He’d break out in hives if he flew coach.”_

_Ethan groaned and pulled an eye mask down over his face. “This better actually be an emergency Chris called us in for,” he grumbled. “Someone better be dying.”_

_Something thudded loudly, and Isaac twisted in his seat to see where the noise had come from. Nothing looked out of place._

_Jackson set a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”_

_Another thump. “You don’t hear that?” Isaac asked._

“ _Hear what?”_

_Thump._

_The announcement bell chimed, and a man’s voice floated into the cabin. “Welcome to the Cedar Springs Hotel, gentlemen. We’ve been expecting you.”_

_Thump. Thump. Thump._

Isaac jolted awake, nearly twisting off the bed. For a long moment, the only thudding was that of his heart. Then, the sound that had woken him up: a loud thumping noise coming from below. He got up and walked to the center of his room. This time, when he heard it, he could feel the vibrations of it against his feet. He tried to think who would be in the room below him, on the second floor, but he didn’t have a good sense of the hotel layout.

The noise came again, and he sighed. Whoever it was, they needed to shut the hell up and let him take his nap in peace.

He pulled on a sweater, slipped on his shoes, then headed out. Isaac’s room was next to the staircase on the third floor, so it was a quick trip down. There, in the corner of the second floor balcony, was a room he hadn’t noticed before, the painted golden numbers peeling. 203.

The door opened easily, unlocked, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the low light of the room. There was a figure sitting in a chair in the corner. As he watched, it tossed a ball into the air so that it hit the ceiling with a thump, then fell back into its waiting hand.

A pair of glasses glinted in the dark. “Isaac,” his father said. “You’re late.”

* * *

  
  


Lydia was pissed. He knew that. It didn’t take a professional investigator to track the rigid, raised line of her shoulders, the tightening of her lips and jaw, the frustrated little clenches of her fists, and realize that she was pissed at him.

“I really thought, after everything, you would be the one person that would be able to break through all of this and _believe me_ ,” she snapped.

He tried for diplomacy. “I believe that you are sensing something,” he conceded. “I believe that you think something is wrong.”

The glare she fixed him with might have struck a lesser man dead. “Don’t you give me that condescending bullshit, Stiles,” she said. “I’m not some hysterical witness you’re questioning, you hear me? I am your friend, I am your pack, and I am a fucking _harbinger of death_. I know what I’m talking about!”

“I just…” Stiles made a frustrated noise, because part of him did want to believe her, but a larger part of him simply _couldn’t_. It didn’t make any sense. “Look, maybe there’s _something_ going on, but you make it sound like the whole place is, like, imaginary or something. That’s…”

“I swear to god, Stiles, if you call me crazy, I will burst your eardrums,” she snarled.

Stiles held his hands up in mock surrender as they left the lush, tropical garden and started down the final stretch of hedges to the hotel. “I guess I don’t really get what you’re trying to say about the place,” he reasoned. “Is it haunted? Is it evil? Is it wolfsbane like the Glen Capris? Give me a little more to work with here.”

Lydia huffed, but she seemed to mull the topic over for a few minutes. They had entered the small, dark tunnel that led from the courtyard out to the gardens when she spoke again, her voice echoing against the stone walls. “The whole place is just full of death,” she told him. “Different from the Glen Capris, though. The place seems… hungry. Like it’s actively feeding. It feels like all of you, all of _us_ are dying.”

They paused at the end of the tunnel where the door to the courtyard stood ajar. “You think the hotel is feeding on us?” Stiles turned to step into the courtyard, but found his path blocked.

Derek stood at the door, lip curled in a snarl, his eyes dark and oddly vacant. “You shouldn’t be talking about things like that,” he growled. And, god, it really was like a growl. Another figure stepped out from behind Derek: Isaac, with that same dead look in his eyes. A low rumble rose from somewhere deep in his chest. His eyes flashed gold, and Stiles jumped back in surprise.

“Look at their hands,” Lydia hissed. “Stiles, look at their hands.”

Claws. They had claws.

“They’re werewolves,” Lydia whispered, her breaths coming short, panicked. “Oh my god, how could I forget that they’re werewolves?”

How could _Stiles_ have forgotten? Of course Derek was a werewolf. Isaac. God damn it, _Peter_ was a werewolf. Scott. He had just been talking about their _pack_. How had he managed to forget that half of his friends were werewolves?

Without looking away from Derek and Isaac, Stiles reached back, groping for Lydia’s hand. He caught her by the wrist and held tight. “Lydia?” he said. “I’m gonna need you to make some noise for us.”

She seemed to remember herself, because Stiles suddenly found himself thrown behind her, covering his ears just in time before she let out a short scream. It knocked Derek and Isaac backwards, leaving them sprawled on the paving stones of the courtyard.

Stiles grabbed her arm again and ran, hauling her along toward her room, the closest. He didn’t think Derek and Isaac followed them, but he also wasn’t about to stop and look back to check. The second they were inside Lydia’s room, both of them panting, he said, “Okay. Okay, I believe you.”

* * *

  
  


The others didn’t scream. They only moaned, low and mournful in the distance. Maybe, Malia thought, they had been down here too long. Maybe they were too tired.

She and Theo screamed.

It felt like being turned inside-out, like something had burrowed into her skin and started eating her from within. She thrashed against the manacles, kicking and shrieking, trying to get away from something that was _inside of her_. There was, of course, no getting away. But her body tried to fight anyway.

When it stopped, she lay against the stone wall, gasping and sobbing. Looking up, Malia saw blood dripping from her wrists where the manacles held them tight. “Why?” she croaked.

Theo was breathing heavily at her side, little whimpers escaping his lips though he seemed to be trying to fight them back. “It’s feeding,” he told her. “All of its power, its energy, comes from the people it feeds on down here. It must have… it must need the energy for something.”

“How the fuck did we even get in this mess?” Malia groaned, eyes sliding shut. Her whole body ached in the aftershocks. Then a memory hit her suddenly, and her eyes opened again. “You,” she remembered. “You called me and told me to come here.”

Theo looked away from her.

“It wasn’t the hotel that called me, was it?” she asked. “Because it never took your voice. That was you. Real you.” When he didn’t look up, Malia took that as a confession. She slammed a foot against the ground. “Damn it, Theo! I’m down here because of you? We’re all stuck here, _dying_ here, because of you!”

“I didn’t have a choice,” he whispered.

“Bullshit,” she growled. “The front desk man, he said you screwed me over. He said you used me to get a room upgrade. What did he mean?”

Theo did look up then, eyes sharp. “He told you that?”

“What did he mean?”

They glared at each other for a long, tense moment, before he seemed to break. He huffed a breath, looked away again. “I knew about this place when I walked in. Because of what the Dread Doctors taught me.”

“You already said that,” Malia snapped, impatient.

“I knew about it,” he said, talking over her, “so the mind games this place plays on people didn’t really work on me. The way it makes people forget, makes them happy and complacent. None of it worked on me because I _knew_. So it had to take a more _direct_ approach to get me in line.”

He said the words ‘direct approach’ so clinically, Malia couldn’t help but think about the Dread Doctors, about what their idea of a direct approach would be. What those words would mean for Theo, who they had, surely, always been direct with.

“I tried to negotiate with them,” Theo explained, voice soft. “Just to… to make it a little easier. Make it stop. And I talked them into a room upgrade. The hotel takes people in order of room number. They said if I could get three people to come, they would put them ahead of me in room order. So I would have more time before it took me. I thought if I just had more time, maybe I could figure out how to get out of this place.”

“Josh and Tracy,” Malia realized, looking toward the hallway where Josh and Tracy’s moans had gone quiet. “They weren’t with you at first. You tricked them in here after.”

“I just needed more time!” Theo snapped.

Something about the desperation in his tone, the need to _control_ the situation, struck Malia wrong. Like this was a sort of plan gone wrong. “Theo,” she said slowly, “how did _you_ end up here?”

He shrugged, a little too casual. “I was on vacation. I just stumbled in.”

“On vacation in the Nevada desert?”

Theo frowned. “It was in Guadeloupe when I got here. An island in the Caribbean.”

“You said it only moves every eleven years,” Malia accused.

“It moves when it’s done feeding,” Theo said. “It only got eight people in Guadeloupe. The locals realized something was wrong with it and stopped going near it.”

Even Malia could figure out that math. “Then you were nine. It shouldn’t have moved until –”

“Josh and Tracy went to Guadeloupe,” he explained. “And then you were supposed to take my place as the eleventh once we got to wherever it went next. That would have given me eleven _years_ to figure out how to escape, but then you went and –”

Malia laughed, cold and furious. “Are you seriously trying to _blame me_ for you being down here when you fucked me over bringing me here?”

Theo’s nose twitched in an echo of a snarl, but he shut up.

“Why were you in Guadeloupe, Theo?” she demanded. “You just _happened_ to go there? Just _happened_ to stumble on a demon hotel that the Dread Doctors told you about?”

He didn’t answer, and they sat there, quiet in the dark. She could hear water dripping somewhere in the alcove, steady and soft as it struck the stones. They could be down here, frozen in time, for years before it was done feeding on them. Long enough for a drip of water to wear away a stone.

* * *

  
  


Hayden’s head buzzed pleasantly with wine, her muscles loose under the churn of the hot tub jets. The air outside the hot tub was mild, just cool enough that the steam from the water felt like a welcome relief. She closed her eyes.

“Ugh,” Kira said from beside her. “I have to pee. I don’t want to go all the way upstairs.”

“Then don’t,” Hayden said without opening her eyes.

“Eww, Hayden!”

Hayden snorted and peeked an eye open. “Not in the hot tub, stupid. There’s a staff bathroom over by the door to the gardens.”

Kira frowned at her. “How do you know that?”

Shrugging a shoulder, she replied, “I’m curious. I poke around.”

Apparently satisfied with that answer, Kira got up, water streaming off the polka dot skirt of her bikini bottoms. Hayden closed her eyes again, listening to the pat of bare feet against the stones as they receded.

The wind rustled through the leaves around her, carrying soft sounds of laughter from the other end of the courtyard, the smell of the roses and lilacs. From somewhere behind her, she heard the creaking of a door.

Hayden opened her eyes and turned. There, tucked in the back corner behind the hot tub, was a door she hadn’t noticed before. Beside it stood her mother and father.

She stared at them.

They smiled back. Her mother gave a little wave.

“Oh, fuck that,” Hayden said.

* * *

  
  


Stiles sprinted up the stairs two at a time, half sure that Derek or Isaac would pop out to attack him when he was least expecting it. He made it to his room unscathed, though, slipping inside and locking the door.

“You’ve been gone all morning,” Peter said. Stiles turned to find him sprawled across the bed, still naked, a book open on his lap and eyes still fixed on it.

“Yeah, sorry,” Stiles said. “Pack drama. You know how it is.”

Peter glanced up, smirking. “What are the chances it’s settled and you’re coming back to bed?”

Stiles heaved a sigh. “Slim,” he lamented. “Horribly, disappointingly slim.” He crossed the room and leaned over to plant one good kiss on Peter’s mouth. “Any chance you want to get dressed and come help me?”

“Is it dangerous?” Peter asked.

“Almost definitely.”

Humming, Peter looked back down at his book. “You know, I think I’ll pass in that case.”

Stiles snorted. “Yeah, I figured.” He pinched Peter’s ear affectionately. “I’ll be back to make it up to you later, yeah?”

Peter waved a hand in dismissal.

* * *

  
  


Kira stepped out of the staff bathroom. She wiped her hands on her hips, then frowned down at them, because she was trying to dry her hands on a wet swimsuit. “Smart,” she remarked to herself.

She turned back to look at the door to the staff bathroom, a little miffed that she’d managed to stay here all this time and not even notice it. She supposed she hadn’t thought much about these doors, figuring it was just employee space. To the left of the door was the alley out into the gardens, sitting ajar. To the right was another unmarked door, as innocuous as the bathroom.

“I can be curious,” she decided. “I can poke around.”

She pushed open the door, full of confidence, then immediately froze, eyes wide, when it opened onto the hotel kitchens. A woman with short brown hair stood at the counter on the opposite side of the room chopping something, her back to Kira. “Sorry!” Kira said quickly. “Wrong door. I thought –”

The woman turned around, saying, “This area is for employees only.”

Kira didn’t recognize her, not really. Only her gaze didn’t fix on the woman’s stern face. Instead, she found herself staring at her neck. She wore a beaded turquoise necklace with animal claws hanging from it.

“You can’t be in here,” the woman said again, and maybe Kira _did_ recognize her, but it made her head swim to think about.

She gaped at the woman for a moment, then stammered, “Sorry! Sorry,” and closed the door.

Kira practically ran back to the hot tub, her feet slipping on the mossy stones, mind a whirl of confusion and half-remembered emotions. She stopped at the edge of the hot tub, where Hayden sat, eyes squeezed shut and hands gripped tight on the sides.

“I think there’s something wrong with this hotel!” Kira hissed, not really sure why she was whispering. She felt suddenly sure that someone or something was watching her.

Hayden opened her eyes and looked up at her. “You’re telling me,” she said.

* * *

  
  


“So have you worked here long?” Jordan asked, drumming his fingers on the counter.

The front desk attendant fixed him with a rather severe look, poorly hit behind a smile. “Quite some time,” he agreed.

Jordan tried on his brightest, friendliest smile, the one that the Sheriff had once told him he should need a permit to carry. It didn’t seem to phase the attendant. “It’s gotta be interesting, right?” he said, “Meeting all sorts of new people. I bet you’ve had people from all over come through here, right?”

He didn’t really know why he was doing this, except that Stiles and Lydia had asked very nicely and told him that it was important. “ _Just talk to him_ ,” they’d said. “ _Do the charming I’m-your-buddy act._ ” And, while Jordan had been mildly affronted that they thought his being nice was an _act_ , he knew better than to question those two when they had a plan.

* * *

  
  


Stiles closed his eyes, focusing on the subtle feel of pins shifting in the lock. Then, just as he was starting to worry he’d gotten it wrong, he heard the click. Sighing in relief, he slowly rotated the lock. The door swung open. He and Lydia slipped inside, not waiting around to be caught.

“It’s a bedroom,” she whispered.

It was. Depressingly plain with stone walls and wood plank flooring, but a bedroom nonetheless. A small, ancient-looking wooden bed sat in one corner. “The attendant’s room?”

Lydia nodded. “That would make sense. There’s a door that goes through toward the office.” She pointed it out.

“I don’t see anything, like… sinister,” Stiles murmured. “Unless a failure to decorate is sinister.” Other than the bed and a single table with a pillar candle on it, the only other item in the room was a faded gray rug in the center of the room.

With a heavy sigh, Lydia stepped toward it. “I’m going to hate this,” she said, then lifted the edge of the rug. Underneath was a trap door. Beneath that, a stone stairway that led down into the dark.

* * *

  
  


“I suppose we have had a rather diverse range of customers over the years,” the attendant agreed. There was something about the way he spoke that made him seem older than he looked. His red-brown skin was tight, smooth, not a laugh or worry line in sight. Still, Jordan couldn’t help but feel that the man was much older than him.

He usually didn’t have this much trouble connecting with people. That was Jordan’s _thing_ , being able to meet people on their level, make them comfortable enough to open up. Why was this guy such a tough nut to crack?

* * *

  
  


“Are you okay?” Stiles asked. He couldn’t even imagine what this basement felt like for Lydia when even he could feel the evil and death in this place.

He felt her hand on his arm, then slipping into his own to grip tightly. “No,” she said.

The stairs had led them to a long hallway. There was a dim glow coming from within, but mostly it was dark. They continued forward, passing through a low archway into a larger room where he could hear dripping water in the distance.

Lydia stopped short, her hand squeezing painfully. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

Whatever had put that tremble in her voice, it wasn’t dripping water. It was the sort of thing that only Lydia heard. “What do you hear?” he asked.

Stiles watched her face in the dim light, her mouth agape, lips trembling as she listened. “A warning,” she said after a pause. “We need to get out of here _now_.”

* * *

  
  


Jordan asked a few more questions about the hotel, about what it was like to work there, and he got the same terse, polite responses, all undercut with impatience, like Jordan was wasting his time. It occurred to him rather suddenly that he hadn’t been calling the man by his name, which was always a good technique for forming a connection with someone during questioning. Use their name often, show that you’re focused on them. And he didn’t even _know_ the attendant’s name. He didn’t wear a name tag like the rest of the staff.

“I’m so sorry,” Jordan said, smiling, “I just realized I don’t know your name.”

“No?” the attendant said. Something in his smile sent a thrill of unease through Jordan.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

In a second, the attendant had a hand clenched in Jordan’s hair, shoving his head down against the counter. The man’s lips nearly brushed Jordan’s ear as he spoke: “Why are you asking so many questions?”

* * *

  
  


Peter glared at the empty half of his bed. He felt healthier than he had in a few days, less drained, but an unnerving sort of emptiness had settled in his chest at Stiles’s absence. He hadn’t wanted to say anything before, didn’t want to push it, whatever this thing they had going on was.

Then there was this pack drama. Peter set his book aside, running through their conversation in his head. Stiles had been flippant in agreeing that it would be dangerous, which Peter had taken to mean that it probably wasn’t. But, then again, Stiles had always been a self-destructive bastard. Maybe he really had gotten himself into some trouble.

Peter got up and pulled on a sweater. He was hungry for dinner anyway, and if he happened to see mayhem and destruction on his way, he would intervene accordingly. Out on the balcony, Peter was headed for the stairs when he caught a bit of movement out of the corner of his eye. He paused.

There was a room there, in the corner behind the stairs. A window beside the door twitched open, then closed quickly. Peter frowned. That he hadn’t noticed the room before wasn’t impossible, he knew that. But it certainly wasn’t natural.

Squaring his shoulders, Peter gripped the doorknob and found that it twisted freely, unlocked. Inside, the room was poorly lit, but he could see that it was laid out differently than the other rooms, the furnishings older. He stepped further inside and heard the door close behind him.

“So what are you?” he asked without turning around to see the presence he could feel standing behind him. “A ghost? A witch?”

“Uncle Peter,” Laura’s voice chided.

He expected to see her as a sort of ghoul when he turned around, ripped-up and dead-eyed like he’d left her all those years ago. Instead, she was young. The way she had looked in high school, all sweetness and half-developed authority. “A ghost, then,” he said.

“There’s something you need to see,” she told him, and stepped closer to the window that faced out over the balcony. She pulled the curtain back just a crack and motioned for him.

Peter frowned, but he followed her. Peering out through the crack in the curtains, he saw the courtyard below. There, just past the arbor vitae tree, Stiles and Lydia were hurrying out from the direction of the pool. She had a hand clutched in his shirt, he with an arm around her waist. They ducked their heads close together as they spoke.

“They’re looking pretty cozy, aren’t they?” Laura murmured. “You know they’ve always had a complicated relationship. He was in love with her for so long. Their breaking up, it was really more logistical than anything.”

“Are you showing me this to hurt me?” he asked.

Laura stroked his arm. “I don’t blame you for what happened, Peter,” she said. “That wasn’t you. Not really. You’re my family. My pack.” When he turned, her eyes were burning red, expression dark as she told him, “I won’t let some human make a fool of you.”

* * *

  
  


Stiles’s heart was still hammering in his chest as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. He could feel Lydia trembling. “That was close,” she said again, breathless. “That was way too close.”

They had slipped out of the attendant’s room just as he came through the other door.

As they stepped onto the second floor balcony, Peter stepped out of a room – not their room – and flashed his eyes at them.

Stiles knew before Peter even spoke. He felt it like his insides had turned to ice.

“You two are looking cozy,” Peter growled.

“No, not you,” Stiles pleaded, hushed.

“Had a nice day together?” he asked.

Lydia stepped forward. “Peter, whatever is going on in your head, I need you to believe me –”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Peter sneered.

Stiles couldn’t even find it in him to fight this. Whatever carefree affection they had found together, he felt it crumbling, and he crumbled right along with it.

“This place is messing with you,” Lydia insisted.

“Stiles. God, you won’t even look at me,” Peter snapped. “Is that how it’s going to be? I’m not what you wanted, but I was here, is that it? But now _she’s_ here.”

Swallowing down the lump in his throat, Stiles murmured, “You’re not going to believe me. It doesn’t matter what I say. You won’t believe me.” He didn’t look up. Refused to look up at the face of someone he cared about, now twisted beyond recognition.

“Whatever,” Peter said. “I’ll go get myself a room.”

Panic surged through Stiles then, overriding his resignation. “No!” Lydia shouted it at the same time, both of them jumping forward as Peter made for the stairs.

“What, you think I’ll stay with you now?” Peter snarled. His eyes flashed again. “I’m getting a room.”

* * *

  
  


“I’m sick,” Theo admitted, voice small in the cold and dark. “Something’s wrong –” He cut himself off and when he started again, his voice was tighter. “Something’s wrong with my heart. Something they did to me. I don’t know.”

Malia didn’t open her eyes. She thought about ignoring him, but he sounded so scared. “So you thought you’d come here? Get a few extra years like those other people that escaped?” she supposed. “This place was dormant, cut off from feeding, and you woke it up again.”

Silence dragged out between them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, a long while later. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: semi-gory depictions of canon deaths, mention of a child death in the Hale fire
> 
> Chapter 8 will be an epilogue of sorts, so the big finale will be next chapter!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The pack comes together to fight the hotel.

Lydia stared at her hands. They were shaking.

The bed dipped beside her, Stiles’s voice brittle as he said, “That was way too close.”

Peter had gotten halfway down the stairs, headed for the front desk, when Lydia had yelped, _“Stiles can stay in my room!”_ and he had looked back at the two of them in a mixture of fury and hurt.

She could tell it had hurt Stiles to say, “ _Yeah. I’ll stay with Lydia. You keep our room.”_

Stiles slumped forward, elbows on his knees. “I can’t believe he thought...”

“It wasn’t him,” Lydia assured him quickly. “It’s the hotel. Like what it did to Derek and Isaac.”

The muscles next to his nose bunched as his face tried to twist itself into a mask of unhappiness, Stiles fighting it back. “Why? Was it – is this punishment for us poking around?”

She smoothed a hand over his back. “Either that or it was trying to clear someone else out of a room. God, it would have had Scott next.”

Stiles sniffed and rubbed at his eyes. In retrospect, he was sure that he and Peter had been under some sort of thrall, back in their room. The obsessive, tireless fucking had seemed beyond their control. Not that they didn’t want it, but more like they’d lost the ability to balance their want for one another against their needs for anything else. For a moment, he found himself worrying that it had all been the hotel – them getting together, the affection, everything.

No, Stiles decided. He had felt things for Peter long before the hotel, and the way Peter had looked at him before, standing in the doorway of his room… well, that had to be real.

“This sucks,” he muttered. “I get dumped and now I’m sleeping on a couch.”

“I’m not going to make you sleep on the couch, Stiles,” Lydia sighed. She ruffled his hair. “And I’m sorry about Peter. I know you… I mean, you’ve had a thing for him for a while. I was surprised you actually ended up doing something about it finally.”

“And we see how that worked out,” he snorted.

Lydia opened her mouth to say, again, that it hadn’t really been Peter, not really. But she didn’t think that was what Stiles needed just then. Not really. Instead, she stood up and started pacing, figuring a distraction would do the job better. Stiles, she knew, needed to feel like he was doing something to fix a problem, not just wallowing in it. “Okay, so that cellar – there’s definitely something going on there. We need a way to get in there again. Ideally without almost getting caught next time.”

Her words did the trick. Stiles straightened up, and she watched him switch into investigation mode. “We have no idea what’s down there,” he told her. “For just the two of us, walking in on an unknown threat like that… it’s more than risky. It’s stupid.”

“What about Jordan? He’s oblivious, but he seems willing to help, at least.”

“That is if the hotel mojo doesn’t get to him in the meantime,” Stiles muttered.

A knock sounded at the door.

They both turned slowly to look at it, silent and tense. It could be Derek and Isaac. Peter. The attendant.

Lydia took a deep breath and motioned for Stiles to stay back as she walked to the door. Her voice was the only weapon they had, after all. She peeked it open just a crack, then pulled it the rest of the way upon seeing Hayden, Kira, and Liam all standing outside.

“Hey,” Kira said, glancing past her at Stiles, then out at the courtyard. She looked nervous. They all did. “Can we talk?”

* * *

  
  


Jordan stepped up to the front desk, his friendliest smile plastered across his face. He didn’t know why his heart was thudding so nervously in his chest at the sight of the attendant – it wasn’t like the man had ever been anything but friendly – so he pushed past the nerves. “Hi,” he greeted, “it’s me again.”

“It’s you,” the attendant agreed stiffly. “Again.”

* * *

  
  


A shout echoed through the stone alcove, ripped from Malia’s throat and underlined by Theo’s bitten-off groans. Tears had gathered in the corners of her eyes. With her head tipped back against the wall, they slipped down her temples, dripping into her ears.

“Fuck!” she snarled once the pain had passed.

Theo panted softly, his eyes closed. “I wasn’t down here long last time,” he said, “but it wasn’t feeding this much before. Something’s going on up there.”

Malia yanked at her chains ferociously. They rattled a little where they were attached to the wall, but mostly she was just adding to the trails of blood that stained her forearms. She huffed and went slack. “Whatever it is, I don’t know how much more I can take,” she said.

“A lot more,” Theo told her. “You’d be surprised how much you can take.”

She felt herself deflate at that, knowing that he was right. The two of them would be able to bear torment and abuse for years longer than any human could.

They fell quiet for a long while, Malia drifting into a sort of half-sleep, the only sort she had managed since waking up in the basement. So it didn’t take much more than the quiet echo of footsteps to rouse her. Malia stretched a foot to the side and nudged Theo’s leg.

“I hear it,” he breathed.

They both stayed still and quiet, eyes fixed intently on the hallway outside their alcove as the steps drew nearer. Malia wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t Kira Yukimura, wide eyed and quietly hissing, “Liam! Over here!”

She rushed into the room, crouching down in front of Malia as Liam skidded into the doorway behind her. “Oh my god, Malia, I forgot you were even – how the hell did I forget you?”

“Holy shit,” Liam gasped, glancing between the two of them.

Hope surged in Malia’s chest. “The hotel,” she rushed to explain, “it’s a demon, and it’s trapped us here to feed on us. Please, you have to – ”

“You’re up there cooking in the kitchen,” Kira said in a rush. She reached up to yank at Malia’s chains near the wall.

“It’s not me. That’s not me up there.”

“You shouldn’t be down here,” Theo cut in, voice hard.

All three of them looked over at him in shock.

“If you’re down here, the hotel knows it,” he told them. “And that means you’re _fucked_. This place has ways of dealing with people that challenge the rules.”

“We’re here to save you, asshole,” Liam said, but he had dropped his voice to a whisper.

“You can’t,” Theo said, and Malia felt her heart sink. Against all odds, their rescue had come, and Theo was _sending them away_. “Even if you could get the chains off, the second we get up there, it’ll just take us down again.”

Kira fell from her crouch down onto her knees, visibly crushed. “We can’t just leave you.”

Malia’s throat felt too tight to voice a response. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Kira and Liam to endanger themselves by staying down here, but she couldn’t tell them to leave her either.

“You have to,” Theo said. “Unless you’ve figured out a way to get us out of the hotel entirely as soon as we get up there, this is just a dangerous waste of your time, got it?”

“How do we get out, then?” Liam demanded.

Theo shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked away. Then, before anyone could prod further, he added, “I do know that you’re safer if you stick together. It attacks people when they’re alone. You hear me? Don’t go anywhere alone.”

Kira wrapped a hand around Malia’s ankle and squeezed. “We’re going to get you out of here, okay?” she said, wearing the earnest expression of someone who believes what they’re saying only because the alternative is unthinkable. “I’m coming back for you, Malia.”

* * *

  
  


The hotel had become strangely quiet lately. Scott stepped outside of his room and glanced around the empty courtyard. There was always someone out there during the day, splashing in the pool or hot tub, lounging or playing chess. Today he heard no one. Even the gardener was gone.

Something seemed to have soured in the atmosphere of their vacation, and Scott didn’t know what to do about it. He’d needed this, needed to be close with his pack – his whole pack – after all this time. Of course he would never tell them not to go off and live their own lives. Truthfully, though, he sometimes felt their distance like each of them had grabbed hold of him somewhere and stretched him out thin.

A door creaked to his left. Scott turned and found Allison, standing in the doorway of room 105. She beamed at him and crooked a finger, beckoning. Scott didn’t even shut his door, just followed after her as she disappeared inside.

The second he stepped into the room, her arms were around his neck, fingers teasing through his hair. “I missed you so much,” she said, bumping their noses together.

“I missed you, too,” he agreed, feeling a little dazed. He hadn’t imagined it, then. She really was here.

Allison’s sweet smile turned serious, eyes going wide as she looked up at him. “Scott, I need to ask you for something. Something really important, okay?”

“Of course.”

Her shoulders relaxed at his agreement. “Good. Because everyone’s in really terrible danger right now. You’re the alpha, Scott. You need to protect them. Protect everyone. Can you do that?”

Scott gazed into her wide, pleading eyes. “I’d do anything for you,” he assured her.

* * *

  
  


“Okay, so there’s five of us that are definitely on the up-and-up,” Stiles reasoned as he paced at the foot of the bed. Hayden and Lydia both sat cross-legged on top of it, Hayden throwing anxious glances at the door every few minutes. Kira and Liam hadn’t been gone long, but none of them would be able to relax until they came back.

“Three of us that are definitely compromised, too,” Lydia sighed.

Hayden frowned, drawing her attention back from the door. “Wait, who besides Peter?”

Stiles winced at the mention. It felt stupid, to feel so _wounded_ over the Peter thing. It was just supposed to be a fling, a no-stakes vacation hookup. But it hurt.

“Derek and Isaac,” Lydia explained. “They threatened us on our way in from the garden yesterday. They were all wolfed out.”

Hayden glanced down at her hands, and Stiles watched as her claws slowly slipped out, then receded. “I can’t believe I forgot what I am. What we are.”

Stiles sat on the end of the bed, mind reeling in a thousand different directions. “I think it’s a way of controlling you. Having a pack of werewolves in here has to be pretty high risk, you know? If it can’t control you the way it’s controlling Derek, Isaac, and Peter, the next best thing is to make you forget that you can fight back.”

“My first day here,” Lydia said, “I saw Ethan stopping by this room on the second floor.” She frowned suddenly, confusion crossing her face. “There’s… I had forgotten. There’s an empty room there.”

“I thought all the rooms had to be full,” Hayden recalled from the hasty info-dump they had shared after Kira, Hayden, and Liam arrived.

Lydia shook her head. “No, there’s an empty one on the second floor. I saw it. And Aiden’s voice was calling to Ethan from inside. I heard it – I heard it the way I hear death. But Ethan could hear it, too, I think. He was going for the door, but I stopped him.”

Little pieces started to come together in Stiles’s mind. He waved a finger, excited. “That was part of how the wolves were being controlled in the Glen Capris,” he said, excited. “Scott told me afterward that he hallucinated his mom dying. Then a few years ago I talked to Isaac about it, and he’d hallucinated his dad.”

Hayden blew out a breath. “Okay, so evil hotels aren’t big on the originality.”

“Or there are limited ways to whammy someone like this,” Lydia added.

“Scott,” Stiles realized suddenly, and the thought hit him like a front bumper to the chest. “Fuck. Scott told me he saw Allison, before him and Kira broke up.”

Lydia rubbed at her temples. “So our alpha is compromised, too.”

Stiles nodded. “That leaves us Jackson, Ethan, Parrish, and Chris.”

“I have a weird question,” Hayden announced. She leaned back on her hands, legs kicked out long in front of her. She frowned. “Was Chris deaf before we got here?”

* * *

  
  


Malia had her fingers wrapped tight around the chain that connected the cuffs on her wrists to the ring on the wall. She gave them a harsh yank. “I swear, it moved a little,” she muttered.

It was funny: Malia had always thought of herself as a particularly self-motivated person. Privately, she could admit that she had even preened over it a bit. The lone wolf (or coyote, as it were). The rogue. Even so, she had been ready to resign herself to torture and death just before Kira and Liam arrived. Seeing them, despite being left behind, had reinvigorated her will. Malia felt stronger, just knowing her pack was out there and willing to fight for her.

“Didn’t you hear anything I just said?” Theo muttered. “It wouldn’t matter if you did get free.”

“So, what? Don’t even try?” she snapped. Malia grunted as she pulled again. “Shut the fuck up, Theo.”

* * *

  
  


Ethan trailed off mid-sentence for the third time in as many minutes. Laughing quietly, Jackson looked over to where his husband lie, stretched out in a rope hammock, suspended between two palm trees. His eyes were closed, mouth hanging open just slightly.

Rising from his seat atop a low wooden platform, Jackson crossed the grassy clearing to the hammock. He bent down and pressed his lips to Ethan’s forehead. “You’re falling asleep,” he whispered.

“No m’not.” Ethan always turned into a contrary child when he got sleepy.

Jackson laughed again and stroked his fingers through Ethan’s hair. “You take a nap. I’m gonna walk around a bit.”

“No, stay,” Ethan protested without opening his eyes. He tugged at Jackson’s shirt.

“What, so you can drool on me?” Jackson teased. He kissed Ethan’s forehead again. “I’ll be back.”

They had been out in the gardens all afternoon, and the sun was starting to dip so low that the aisles between the towering hedges were completely shadowed. Overhead, the sky had gone a hazy violet. He would have to wake Ethan up and drag him back to the hotel before too long.

The next garden had two towers of flat stones stacked on either side of the entrance, a dirt path leading into a thick stand of bamboo. Jackson could hear water splashing ahead. The bamboo stand opened before an ornate wooden platform, surrounded by stone statues and built over a pond. On one end, water poured from the mouth of a giant stone dragon, its eyes wide and claws extended.

Jackson skirted along the edge of the pond toward it, his sneakers sinking into the sodden earth. Up close, he saw that the water wasn’t only coming from the dragon’s mouth, but from its eyes also in thin streams that left little tear tracks of moss down the creature’s cheeks. Its expression, which he had taken at first as a ferocious roar, looked suddenly like a scream of agony.

It set a heavy feeling into his chest.

He turned and startled, finding himself face-to-face with yet another stone dragon, this one perched atop a column, its long tail twisting down the length of it. Its head was thrown back, mouth wide as if shrieking. Looking toward the pond then, he noticed a third dragon, just barely poking above the surface of the pond. This one’s face wasn’t fully visible. As Jackson stared at it, however, a live snake surfaced from the water on the the far side of it and slithered onto the dragon’s back. Then another, both dark black with scales glinting in the water.

Jackson stumbled back a step. He collided with the side of the fountain dragon, but a hissing noise had him twisting around and away just as quickly. Black snakes were scaling the dragon from all sides, coming over the top of it and out of its mouth, twisting around its snout. His breath came in short gasps as he took another step backward. One of them lunged at him from its perch, and Jackson held his hands up in front of his face.

He screamed.

His hands were covered in scales, tipped with the long, translucent claws of a kanima. The scales went all the way up his arms, disappearing under the sleeves of his shirt. Jackson kept shouting as he felt his chest and found it hard with scales. His neck, too. He rushed for the pond again, dropping to his knees to look at his reflection. What he saw was a monster from his worst nightmares: a mask of scales and fear. Inhuman.

Jackson yelled and slashed a clawed hand at the surface of the water. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, yet the screams kept coming, rasped in horror and not enough air.

Arms wrapped around him from behind, holding him firm and tight.

“Jackson,” Ethan said.

Jackson sobbed through another scream.

“Jax, honey, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you.” Ethan hugged Jackson tight against his chest, not giving him enough space to do anything but curl in and let the sobs turn to shudders and gasps. Fingers stroked over his hair. “You’re okay. I’m right here. I’m right here.” Ethan kissed his temple, and Jackson could feel his lips touch the skin of his face.

Warily, he looked down at his hands again. Skin. Just skin.

* * *

  
  


On their way down, Kira and Liam had been tense, terrified. Walking back to the stairs, a heavy sorrow weighted down their fear so much that Liam almost didn’t hear the footsteps approaching the attendant’s bedroom. They didn’t have time to get out and escape to the courtyard. They just barely had enough time to pull the rug and cellar hatch closed over their heads.

They stood on the steps, holding their breath as they listened to the attendant walking above them. The scrape of a chair. It was nearly pitch dark, so Liam had to shine his eyes to see Kira’s face, inches from his own. She shook her head helplessly.

Liam grabbed her hand and pulled her back the way they had come.

“We can’t just stay down here,” Kira hissed. “You heard what Theo said.”

“Yeah, well we definitely can’t go out that way,” Liam muttered. “And we have no way of knowing the next time he’ll leave.”

She nodded and slipped her hand into his, giving it a squeeze. For bravery, or maybe for luck. “Let’s go to the other end. Maybe there’s another way out.”

They crept back down the passageways, a rattling metallic sound drifting toward them. Then Theo’s voice, soft: “God, would you stop? Would you just give it up?”

They both looked up when Kira and Liam walked past again. Malia had her hands wrapped around her chains and fresh blood on her arms.

“We have to go the other way,” Liam explained, feeling a little awkward to be leaving them twice.

The cellar path coiled and twisted in ways that made Liam think more than once that they should have gone around in a circle. But, eventually, the path came to an end. They turned a corner and found themselves staring down a flat stone wall.

“No,” Liam sighed. He fell forward against the wall, shoulders feeling far too heavy.

“Do that again,” Kira whispered.

“Slump over in defeat?”

She made an impatient noise and stepped forward, throwing her weight at the wall. It didn’t budge.

“I don’t think it’s – ”

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

Liam stood back up, stepped back, then threw himself against the wall. He heard an echo on the other side. “Holy shit.” He backed away again, eyes scanning the wall and fixing on a thin bit of light at the bottom of it. “Kira, look at the ground!”

“We can move this,” she said. “Come on, push with me on this side.”

They both stepped up to the right hand side of the wall and braced their shoulders against it, facing one another. They shoved once. Nothing.

Liam dug down in himself for anger, drawing out the feelings of helplessness and confusion that had been overwhelming him since Kira and Hayden told him about their suspicions. He turned it all into rage. How dare this place attack him, his pack, his loved ones? Who the fuck did it think it was messing with?

He felt his fangs dropping, claws digging into the stone. In front of him, he saw Kira’s eyes flare golden, the aura of the fox rising around her.

“On three,” she said.

Liam nodded. “One.”

“Two.”

“Three!” they said in unison, and both surged against the wall, their shouts echoing down the corridors.

The wall gave a groan, then the ear-grating sound of stone scraping against stone as the wall slowly rotated. One more shove, and it had opened just wide enough for them to slip through.

There was a small, dimly lit room beyond. At the center of it, the most beautiful thing Liam had ever seen: a ladder.

* * *

  
  


“I swear,” said Jackson. He was still shaking under Ethan’s hands as they made their way back through the gardens. “It was so real. I could feel the scales under my shirt.”

Ethan squeezed him tighter with the arm around his shoulders. “I believe you. I believe that you saw it. I’m just saying that I didn’t see any scales. I mean, it sounds like one of your nightmares, right?” Jackson hadn’t had a nightmare about being the kanima for a couple of years now, but they had been frequent in the early days of their relationship.

They stepped out of the first garden into the deep shade of the hedges that led back to the hotel.

“I was awake,” Jackson insisted. “It felt like the hallucinations I had back then.”

A shout called out from behind them, and they turned to see Kira and Liam stepping out of a wooden shed down the line of hedges.

Ethan turned and looked in the other direction, then back at the shed. It was a small thing, but not concealed by any sort of greenery. It stood directly opposite from the path that led to the hotel, about equal distance past the opening that led to the gardens. “Has that always been there?” he asked, baffled.

“We… we would have seen that before, right?” Jackson agreed.

Kira and Liam ran toward them across the grass. “Are you guys alright?” Kira asked.

Ethan stared at her, then stared past her at the shed, then looked over at his recently-hallucinating husband. His brow furrowed. “I don’t think so,” he admitted.

* * *

  
  


Jordan had never been much of a napper, even when he was working grave shifts. They always left him feeling more tired than he had before. Instead, he would take melatonin to help him fall asleep at the odd hours the job sometimes demanded.

He’d been napping frequently since they arrived, though. While he was talking to the attendant, a wave of exhaustion overcame him, and he really, truly, needed a nap.

Heading down the balcony toward his room to do just that, he stopped at the sight of Chris, standing at the railing. The sky had gone dusky, sun sunk over the roof and only the ambient light illuminating his features. He wore a stony expression, brows furrowed and mouth twisted into a frown.

Jordan stepped up to his side, tapping him just above the elbow to alert him to his presence. Once Chris looked up, he carefully enunciated, “Are you okay?”

Chris’s frown deepened, and he looked down at the courtyard. Jordan followed his gaze just in time to see Hayden, Lydia, and Stiles step out of Lydia’s room on the first floor. A door creaked below where he and Chris stood.

“What happened?” Hayden called.

Kira, Liam, Jackson, and Ethan stepped out from the balcony below them, Ethan’s arm tight around Jackson. “There’s another way down,” Liam said.

Chris’s hand tightened on Jordan’s wrist. He pointed at the rowan tree.

Four figures stepped out from under it, at first too shadowed to see in the darkening courtyard. Then eyes shone in the darkness: one set of red, two blue, and one gold. Their growls echoed loud enough that even Jordan could hear them, up here on the second floor. Scott stepped out first, his face as wolf-like as he had ever seen it. Peter, Derek, and Isaac flanked him, all of them with teeth bared.

The rest stood in the center of the courtyard, huddled together in a group and staring at the wolves in surprise and horror. “Come on, guys,” Lydia pleaded. “You’ve gotta snap out of this. Please.”

The wolves advanced slowly.

“Peter,” Stiles said. “Peter, if you’re in there, _please_. Whatever fucked up stuff the hotel is putting in your head, it’s not true.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Jackson asked. Then, “Isaac, what the hell are you doing?”

Beside him, Chris shook his head. “Scott,” he said. “They get the alpha, the rest will follow.”

Jordan stared at him. His tenure in Beacon Hills had often left him feeling like he had no fucking clue what was going on, but this really took the cake. He had _no fucking clue what was going on_. But he knew Chris’s instincts. He knew to trust them.

“Talk to Scott!” he yelled down to the courtyard. “You have to get through to Scott!”

They all looked up at him in surprise, and the wolves took that as their opportunity to advance another couple of feet so that they were in lunging distance of the rest.

“I’m sorry!” Kira blurted out. Her words were soft, but echoed up through the courtyard. “I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to understand what was happening. I’m sorry I assumed the worst. I know now that it was just this place messing with us. It wasn’t your fault.”

Scott snarled.

“Scott, you’re attacking your own pack,” Jackson snapped. “This isn’t who you are.”

That got an even louder snarl.

Stiles stepped forward, maybe a foot away from Scott. “Please, buddy. I know you miss Allison, but whatever she’s been putting into your head, it’s not real. She’s not real. _We’re_ real. The pack you still have left.” He seemed to falter for a moment, then pressed on. “Look, I know we’ve all sort of scattered over the years, but we’re still pack. We’re still family. You know we’re all here for you whenever you need us, just like we know that you’re here for us. No matter how far away we go.”

The red in Scott’s eyes seemed to flicker.

Liam stepped up next to Stiles. “Malia is in trouble, Scott. You remember her?”

Scott’s eyes flickered again, and he shook his head like he was trying to get rid of a fly.

“She’s chained up in the basement. Malia’s going to die here if we don’t do something to save her.”

When he lifted his head next, Scott’s features had gone human. Stiles lunged forward, wrapping his arms around Scott’s shoulders, followed quickly by Liam, then Kira.

But that left them all too close to the other wolves, who snarled and rushed forward.

* * *

  
  


That crawling feeling had started under Malia’s skin again. Not quite pain, not yet, but she knew it would be. “Something’s happening,” she said, twisting around to get onto her knees. “It’s happening again, Theo. I can’t – not again. We have to get out of here.”

“You’ve been yanking on those chains for ages!” Theo snapped. “Do you really think they’re suddenly going to give way?”

“It won’t be _sudden_ ,” she growled, grasping and yanking with a grunt, “if I’ve been pulling on them for ages, now will it?” Malia rose into an awkward crouch, her bare feet braced against the base of the wall as she heaved backward with a yell.

* * *

  
  


Scott spun around to face the other wolves, eyes red again, but this time he had his arms spread wide in front of the others, protecting them. He opened his mouth wide and roared loud and long, the sound reverberating through the whole hotel. It shook the balcony under their feet.

Jordan felt the roar cut through him like a punch to the gut. He wasn’t a wolf, but he knew the call of his alpha all the same. Beside him, Chris started to laugh. Jordan looked at him and saw tears in Chris’s eyes, mouth spread wide in a smile.

“I hear it,” he said.

* * *

  
  


The roar echoed through the walls of the dungeon, shaking down the length of Malia’s chains and right into her bones. Her eyes flared blue, face shifting and fangs descending as she roared in return and pulled on the shuddering chains.

* * *

  
  


Peter felt like he was coming up for air after too long under the surface. Even as his fangs and claws were still receding, he felt himself coming back to awareness, back to himself. He stumbled forward. Shaking his head to try to dispel the last of the haze in his mind, he looked up at Scott.

They didn’t really talk about it, the fact that Scott was his alpha. The truth was, if he wasn’t, Peter would be an omega, untethered and vulnerable to all sorts of danger. He had stayed in Beacon Hills when so many had not. He had long since given up on pretending he might not help the pack when they were in danger. Scott, for his part, seemed to understand the injury it would do to Peter’s pride for either of them to acknowledge their dynamic. This was the only time Scott had ever used his status as an alpha against Peter.

He gave one short nod of thanks.

Then his eyes moved past him to Stiles, still tucked behind Scott’s outstretched arms, eyes wide and pulse racing. All of them had elevated heart rates, but Peter could pick Stiles’s out of the crowd with barely a thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean it.”

As easy as that, Stiles was ducking under Scott’s arm and running the few steps across the courtyard, throwing himself into Peter’s arms. Their lips met, hard and desperate as Peter wrapped his arms tight around Stiles’s waist, holding him close. When they parted, Stiles was grinning at him. “So much for keeping this casual, huh?” he said.

Peter smirked. “Say what you will about mortal peril, but it does put things in perspective.”

Isaac’s voice cut through their moment. “Not that this isn’t a precious moment and all,” he sassed, tension cutting through his tone, “but speaking of mortal peril...”

“Behind you!” Chris shouted as he and Jordan ran up to the group.

They turned to look as a mass of people emerged from the lobby. The staff, headed by the front desk attendant. As the sky went darker overhead, the lamps in the courtyard flickered on, casting an eerie glow over the staff’s murderous expressions.

Stiles fumbled at Peter’s shoulder. “I think… I think now is when we run,” he decided.

* * *

  
  


Hayden made it to the garden door first, wrenching it open and holding it wide for the others as they rushed after her. Liam hesitated, like he might try to pull her through with him, but she snapped, “Go!” and shoved him into the tunnel. Derek was the last one through before her, the hotel staff hot on his heels. Hayden felt her features shifting, fangs dropping as she turned to snarl at them.

She wouldn’t be able to take them all, but she could sure as hell hold them off long enough to buy the others time.

Standing in the entry to the garden tunnel, Hayden squared her shoulders and flashed her eyes to see them better in the quickly darkening courtyard. She snarled in challenge as the waiter, Theo, rushed at her. He swung a fist, which she blocked easily, but it was enough to distract her from his other hand, which rushed up to grab her around the neck like a vise.

Theo was stronger than she had expected, lifting her off her feet by her throat so that Hayden could only choke and scrabble at his arm with both hands. The security guard tried to get past them on Hayden’s right, but she lashed out at him, claws extended, and caught him across the face. The skin tore, but he she couldn’t see blood, even with her eyes glowing. Couldn’t smell it either.

She hadn’t been able to turn her head to see him, could only look out of the corner of her eye. But as the security guard fell back, she saw something else. Just there, in the shadows out of the corner of her eye.

The room at the end of the wall. The room she had seen her parents in front of.

Just as her lungs were starting to scream in protest at the lack of air, Theo made a soft noise of surprise. His face began to change, hard to see at first. His eyes grew darker, seeming to sink into his face. He dropped her, and she stumbled onto her feet. Theo staggered forward at her for a couple of steps, one arm outstretched. The arm began to disintegrate before her eyes, falling to the ground in an ashy powder. Hayden could only gape at him as she caught her breath.

An arm snaked around her middle, yanking her backward into the dark of the tunnel.

“Run!” Liam shouted.

They ran, the staff a tangible presence behind them as their footsteps echoed down the tunnel. The second they stepped out onto the lawn, the outer door slammed shut between them and the staff. Derek and Scott stood with their shoulders braced against it.

Her chest ached from running so hard after being choked out.

“I don’t think this will hold long,” Derek admitted, his feet sliding on the grass as the door shook and groaned behind him.

Several feet in the other direction, Kira stood next to the gap in the hedges that led through to the gardens, glaring at an expanse of dark, empty lawn. “It was right here!” she shouted. “Ethan, Jackson, you saw it before, right? There was a shed right over there.”

“A shed?” Hayden asked, because how in the hell was _that_ going to get them out of the hotel?

“The other stairwell to the basement,” Liam explained. “We have to get the others out.”

Right. The others. There were others that they’d all forgotten. She could conjure Malia to mind now, since Liam had mentioned her, but couldn’t even begin to remember the rest. Had they been people she was close with? Friends? Pack?

Closer to them, Peter, Stiles, and Lydia were huddled together in a heated argument. “You know there’s no end to the maze,” Peter snapped. “You’ve said it yourself.”

“I said it under the brain-wack the hotel had us under,” Stiles snapped. “It’s a maze. Of _course_ there’s an end.”

Everyone had clumped off like that, stuck in their own arguments about how to get out, how to rescue the others, what they should do next.

“The corner of my eye,” Hayden whispered. Her mind was scattered in a thousand places, but that one thought was sticking with her.

“What?” Liam asked.

“I saw the door out of…” She stood facing one side of the hedge rows, the hotel door to her left. Then, very slowly, she turned her eyes to the right. “...the corner of my eye.” There, hidden in the shadows on the other end of the hedge row, was a little wooden shed.

She didn’t wait to explain, just took off for it at a run that had her battered throat screaming in protest.

“Hayden? Where are you – ”

“I see it!” she shouted, her voice little more than a rasp.

The door to the shed opened, and Hayden skidded to a stop, maybe five yards short of it. A figure stepped out onto the grass, then turned and reached back inside. Out came another, stumbling and holding onto the first one’s arm. Hayden flashed her eyes and gasped as she recognized Theo and Josh. Then Malia, her arm around Tracy’s waist, helping her walk out. They were all wearing faded rags, feet bare.

Memories rushed at Hayden so fast they stole what little breath she had. Her old pack.

She only had a few seconds to recover from the shock before a horrific groaning echoed down the hedge rows. They all whipped around to face the hotel door. Liam and Parrish had gone to help Scott and Derek hold the door, but all four of them were skidding back on the lawn.

“Run!” Scott called.

Hayden rushed to Malia and Tracy. Her throat had started to heal, felt a little less raw as she said, “I’ll take her,” and scooped Tracy into her arms. They all broke into a sprint for the first garden.

* * *

  
  


The stronger among them could easily have gotten farther ahead, but Peter stayed close at Stiles’s side as they ran. Stiles was glad, since the first garden was lit by just a few dim paper lanterns. The others were doing the same, flanking the more vulnerable members of the pack. Ahead of them, Malia and Theo were practically dragging Josh, his arms over their shoulders. Stiles watched his foot catch on a rock. Josh nearly slipped out of their grasp, and when they turned to grab him, their faces went pale in the light of the moon rising above the hedges.

Stiles had been trying very hard not to look back, but he couldn’t help himself anymore.

The staff had grown into larger, more monstrous versions of themselves. Their bartender Nora, for one, was at least seven feet tall, shoulders broad and massive fangs hanging from her mouth. Her eyepatch had fallen off, and the hole where her eye was missing had grown into a gory, gaping hole that covered most of the side of her head. Those that had been impersonating Theo, Tracy, and Josh were gone, but there were others he hadn’t seen. Eight in total, plus the desk attendant. He hadn’t changed at all, but he stood at the head of the group, eyes black and face grim.

While he was looking back, Stiles tripped over his own feet and stumbled. Peter caught him, pulled him upright. “We have to fight!” Peter called at the others. “We don’t even know what we’re running for!”

The others slowed and turned. Stiles quickly found himself shuffled into the middle of the group. It had been years since they had all fought together like this, and Stiles found himself faintly stunned at how easily they fell back into formation. Chris and Lydia came into the center with him. Peter moved to the front with the other heavy-hitters.

Claws were coming out, faces shifting and fangs snarling forward. Tails slithered up from under Tracy’s skirt and out of the back of Jackson’s pants. Kira’s fists glowed with electricity, and it was strange to see her ready to fight without a sword in hand. Josh reached over and took hold of her wrist, snarling in satisfaction as some of the electricity raced up his arm, charging his eyes a bright purple.

The demons advanced.

“You’ve made quite a lot of trouble for us,” the attendant said. “Perhaps we underestimated the risks of taking on a whole wolf pack.”

“Who’s we?” Theo snarled. “You’re a demon. You’re just one demon.”

The attendant laughed. “You came in here thinking you knew so much about us, Mr. Raeken. Arrogant, that’s what you were.” He extended his hands to the side, indicating the army of monsters at his back. “This is the demon. Me? I am but a loyal servant. A caretaker. And I will protect my master.”

His head tipped backward, mouth wide as he began chanting in a language Stiles didn’t recognize.

“Oh, _fuck that_ ,” Hayden muttered.

“We focus on him,” Scott directed without looking away from their enemies. “Fight the others off, but we need to go after the attendant.”

When the attendant looked up at them again, his eyes were burning like black flames, smoke rising from them. Stiles felt dread sink low in his gut. They had no weapons, no idea what they were up against. The only thing they had going for them was that they were all here, almost the whole pack.

An ear-ringing boom struck to their left with a flash of light from outside the outer wall of the hedge. It shook the ground, sending them all stumbling against one another, some of them – Stiles included – sprawling onto the ground.

“What the fuck was that!” someone shouted, maybe Malia.

Stiles pushed up onto his knees, eyes tearing away from the monsters to look at the outer hedge.

The fighting started then. He could hear the wolves snarling, rushing forward, could hear grunts and whines of pain. Someone went flying through the air just in front of him, their back dragging a muddy trench through the ground as they landed.

Stiles kept staring at the hedge.

He walked slowly toward it. The chaos around him seemed muted. Distantly, he could hear Peter shouting his name.

There, at the top of the hedge, was a thin pillar of smoke silhouetted against the moon.

“There’s something on the other side,” he said, mostly to himself. Then, belatedly realizing that this was maybe something the rest of them needed to know, he yelled, “There’s something on the other side! The hedge is burning!”

He turned and saw Lydia screaming at the maid-monster, her arms extended as the sound waves threw her opponent backward.

“Lydia!” he yelled. “The hedge is burning!”

She looked over at him, then to the top of the hedge, eyes wide. “Jordan!” she called.

The monster advanced again, and Stiles cried out a moment too late, “Lydia, look out!” It caught her around the neck with both hands, able to lift her like she weighed nothing.

Stiles sprinted toward it, not even sure what the hell he thought he was going to do against this thing. Perhaps, then, it was a good thing that Peter came barreling up from behind him and tackled the beast to the ground before Stiles could get there.

Lydia fell away, sprawled on the ground and coughing as she clutched at her throat. “Jordan,” she croaked, and Stiles understood.

He weaved through the chaos, dodging flailing limbs, bolts of electricity, people snarling and leaping through the air. He found Jordan with a flaming arm locked around the neck of one of the monsters as it fought with Derek.

“Jordan, the hedges will burn!” Stiles shouted at him. “We can get through.”

His words distracted Jordan just long enough to get knocked off backward, but the second he was down, Malia was up there in his place, claws sinking into the bloodless neck of the beast.

Stiles grabbed Jordan’s hand, hauling him up off the ground and dragging him back to the outer hedge. “We can get through,” he said again, panting. “We can get out.”

At the outer hedge, Jordan pushed Stiles back a few steps and closed his eyes. In a second, his body was engulfed in flames, clothes burning away. He looked back at Stiles once, nodded, then walked at the hedge. At first, it looked like he’d been wrong, like the hedges wouldn’t burn. Slowly, though, bit by bit, they began to smolder and wilt away from him. Jordan shoved his hands into them, snarling as he pushed them out and away, sending waves of flame outward.

Stiles looked back at the group. The greatest danger now was that some of them would get pinched off toward the inner side of the garden. “This way!” he shouted. “Retreat this way!” Scott heard him first and echoed his call, and soon there were multiple calls of, “Retreat to the outer wall!”

The moment Jordan broke through to the other side, Stiles saw the hedges starting to close in after him. He rushed forward, grabbing the still-smoldering branches to pull them back even as they singed at his hands. “Jordan, keep it burning!” he yelled.

The others made a run for it. When Jackson got to him, he must have smelled Stiles’s hands cooking. He grabbed him by the collar and shoved him through the hedge before Stiles could voice a word of protest. He stumbled out into a barren, moonlit desert. Jordan stood at the hedge, still pushing out flames to beat back the advancing hedges.

Maybe twenty yards out sat several cars – including Stiles’s – circled around a campfire.

Stiles stood there, staring at it with his burned hands cradled against his chest.

“Are you hurt?” asked a voice, a hand wrapping around his forearm.

Startled, Stiles looked up and saw – “Mason?”

Mason smiled at him. “Come on, I’ve got a first aid kit in my car.”

“The others,” Stiles said, turning back to the hedge. There were huge scorch marks streaking up the side of the hedges. “Did you guys try to blow up the hedge?”

“Yeah. Twenty blocks of C4 and we barely made a dent. Thank god for Jordan, huh?” And then Mason’s gaze drifted seemed to stick where it had landed, and Stiles _knew_ that thirsty expression. “Thank _God_ ,” Mason reiterated.

Stiles snorted, but he was too focused on watching the last of them rush through the hedges. Scott and Peter came through last, obviously fighting off something on the other side. He frantically tried to do a headcount. No one missing. They made it.

Peter rushed across the sand toward him, hands closing around his shoulders. With nothing but moonlight and the distant fire to light his face, Stiles could see that he had taken one hell of a beating, nose bloody and injuries healing on his face and one shoulder, where his shirt had torn. “Are you alright?” Peter asked.

He almost laughed at the absurdity of being asked that by a man whose face was bleeding so much. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just some burns.”

“Alright!” a voice called out, sharp and authoritative. Stiles looked over his shoulder and saw Braeden standing in front of the fire, an assault rifle over one shoulder. Corey stood beside her, arms loaded down with what Stiles assumed were more weapons. “How about we take this reunion a little bit farther away from the demon hotel?”

So they all made their way to the camp, shuffling and tired and quietly checking on one another as they went. Stiles stayed tucked against Peter’s side, glad for the warmth and the reassurance that in a hotel full of things that weren’t quite real, this had been real.

He had just settled onto the tailgate of Mason’s truck, ready to get doctored, when someone at the edge of camp gave a shout. It was Theo, standing just outside the circle of light cast by the fire, staring back the way they had come. “It’s gone,” he said.

Like a mirage, the hotel had vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: snakes, minor injuries/gore.
> 
> The next chapter will follow up in the immediate aftermath.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theo and the pack recover from the hotel and spend a night in the desert.

“Where did it go?”

Theo glanced to the side and saw Scott standing there, shoulders squared for defense. He’d apparently taken some nasty damage to his back, his shirt in tatters and the skin beneath still knitting itself back together.

Looking at the expanse of desert where the hotel had once stood, Theo sighed. “It’s not supposed to move until it’s done feeding. None of the records I’ve seen talked about it moving more than once every eleven or thirteen years. But...” He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s not supposed to lose all of its residents either. I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

“You knew about it,” Scott said, as if just remembering the way the attendant had called him out, back there in the gardens.

Theo was too tired, body still recovering from his ordeal in the basement. He didn’t think he had it in him to fight Scott. He certainly wasn’t up for running and finding his own way through the desert. “I didn’t know as much as I thought I did,” he conceded glumly.

Scott was frowning at him like he had a thousand more questions of increasing heat and intensity, so Theo scrambled to fill in the ones he assumed were the most urgent.

“I think we wounded it,” he said. “It feeds off its prisoners. All of its magic, the way the hotel works, the staff – all of it is powered by the people it keeps trapped in the basement. It just lost all of its food _and_ dumped a shit-ton of energy into fighting us on our way out. It’s probably weak. Vulnerable. We could have come back and torched the whole place if it stayed put. I think it ran and hid.”

“But it’s still out there somewhere,” Scott pressed. His brow furrowed. “How do you know any of this?” he asked.

That was the line of questioning that would lead to Theo wandering the desert alone. He shifted uneasily, searching for some sort of save. What he came up with was, “Your back.”

Scott raised an eyebrow.

“You’re going to end up healing around the fabric from your shirt,” Theo said. “You should get it cleaned up.”

Scott frowned at him for another moment, searching his face. Then he sighed, shoulders slumping. He nodded and headed back toward the camp.

* * *

  
  


When Theo finally forced himself to walk toward the campfire, Mason and Braeden were sitting beside it. She was poking at the wood, working another log onto it.

“I know you’re all tired,” Mason said, “but it’s not going to be too comfortable sleeping out here tonight. The nearest town is only an hour away. We could go find a motel.”

Several voices spoke up in unison: “No!”

They all glanced between themselves, then broke into quiet, tired laughter.

“Right,” Mason agreed. “No motels, no hotels.”

Lydia dropped onto the ground next to Braeden. “A night under the stars might do us some good,” she declared.

“A night with no walls.” Hayden’s voice drifted across the camp. She and Liam sat in the back of a hatchback, a blanket wrapped around their shoulders.

Theo didn’t sit at the fire. It didn’t feel right. Instead, he sat against the side of a car and watched as everyone else settled in for the night.

While they were at the hotel, Theo had figured out that the McCall pack had become scattered since he left Beacon Hills. Even so, they operated like a well-oiled machine. Everyone helpful. Everyone warm and familiar with one another. Corey passed out a few snacks they’d scrounged up from the various cars. Peter and Stiles sat in the open back of an SUV while Peter carefully wrapped bandages around Stiles’s hands, then pressed his lips to the insides of his wrists. Kira sat behind Scott at the fire, carefully cleaning the wounds on his back. Even his old pack seemed to have been adopted into their strange domesticity. Someone had found a pack of cards, and Josh was dealing them out to her, Jackson, and Ethan.

Before he knew it, Theo was casing the campsite like he would a battleground, seeking out the positions of his potential enemies. He could hear Chris on the other side of an SUV.

“Isaac, any stakes left?” he called.

“Nope. Do you need this?”

“That’s the rainfly. We won’t need it.”

He spotted Derek and Jordan off a ways, leaning against the side of a car facing away from the fire. They were speaking in such low tones, Theo had to strain to hear them.

“What do you remember,” Derek asked, “about that night in the garden?”

That left one unaccounted for. Theo closed his eyes, dropping his forehead against his knees as he listened, scanning the area for a now-familiar heartbeat.

A voice immediately to his left, too close too suddenly, startled him. “So what’s the plan?” Malia asked. When he looked up, she was leaning on her elbows on the trunk of the car. She had apparently found a long sweater, but beneath it she still wore the rags the hotel had left them in during their time in the basement.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“C’mon, you’ve gotta have a plan,” she insisted. “Steal one of our cars? Play nice so someone gives you a ride, then ditch them at a rest stop? I _know_ you’re not planning to walk yourself off into the desert alone.”

He might have been irritated if she’d guessed his plan, but Theo found himself even more irritated that he didn’t actually have one yet. Malia was overestimating him. “I could do it,” he argued instead of answering directly. “If I shifted, I could make it. Coyotes live out here.”

Malia snorted and rolled her eyes. “Alright, nature boy.” An object flew out of her hand at his head, and Theo caught it on instinct. He glanced down. A water bottle. “At least have a drink before you go wandering the desert, yeah?”

It had been a while since he’d had a drink. He cracked the lid open and took a drink before asking, “What do you care?”

“That’s kind of what we do around here, in case you didn’t notice.” She glanced toward the campfire. “We care about people.”

“You care about your own,” Theo snapped. When he followed her gaze to Tracy and Josh, he added, “Well, you sure as hell don’t take care of people like me.”

She gave a put-upon sigh, then came to sit on the ground next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder. “I don’t like you,” Malia told him flatly. It wasn’t a surprise, but it stung anyway. Dirt in the wound and all that. Then she asked, “How bad is it? Whatever’s wrong with your heart, I mean.”

Theo felt himself stiffen at the mention of it, suddenly aware of his own pulse. It felt and sounded steady now, but when he was least expecting it, it would skitter and start until his head swam. Sometimes until he ended up on the ground. He took a long drink to stall his answer.

“That bad?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, then flipped to sarcasm. “What with all of the supernatural-savvy doctors out there, I’ve been overwhelmed with competing opinions.”

“Liam’s in med school,” Malia said, as if that meant anything to him. “Or, at least he was before we went into the hotel. Hopefully Braeden came up with a cover story for all of us.” She drummed her fingers on her knee. “But Liam’s in med school. Melissa’s a nurse. Scott and Deaton run the vet clinic together now.”

He didn’t try to keep the bitterness from his tone as he muttered, “Sounds like you’re all nice and taken care of, then.”

Theo could feel Malia staring at him, but he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. She said nothing, just stared until he could practically feel her gaze burning through the side of his head. He finally turned. Her lips were pressed tight together in a long, displeased line.

“The way I figure it,” Malia said, “you’re not the kind of guy to just crawl off and find a hole to die in. You already started up one supernatural shitstorm trying to cure yourself and almost got all of us killed. So either you’re gonna go find something _else_ to save yourself – and the next one will probably start the apocalypse, knowing you – or you go to Beacon Hills. Try not to be such a dick. Ask them to help you.”

He tried to picture the scenario in his head, but it seemed to absurd. He’d spent weeks living in a demonic hotel, but groveling to Scott McCall for medical treatment? Then _receiving_ treatment? Sitting around the old veterinary clinic in a hospital gown while Liam Dunbar took his blood pressure? No, Theo’s imagination wasn’t that good.

“Why the hell would they help me?”

“That’s kind of what we do around here,” Malia said again, “in case you didn’t notice.”

He stared at her, waiting for her to crack, to admit it was a joke. Or maybe for her to give him some sort of sign, something that would let him believe her. Theo couldn’t think what sort of sign he would need. Regardless, he didn’t see it.

Malia exhaled, long and heavy, then pushed to her feet. “Think about it.” She squeezed his shoulder. She paused. “Hey, what’s up with the clothes anyway?”

Theo looked down at his ragged clothing, running his fingers along the bottom hem of his shirt. The stitches were uneven, the thread coarse. “I think it’s from the people before us,” he explained. “I think it’s dead people’s clothes.”

Her lip curled in disgust. “Sorry I asked,” she muttered. Malia turned and headed for the campfire.

* * *

  
  


_Theo floated through pitch black water, cold. He couldn’t orient himself, couldn’t find any source of light. His lungs burned, chest aching as he swam first in one direction, then another. He could feel his mind starting to dim, aching and spinning as he searched vainly for the surface. A soft shuffling noise filtered through the water behind him._

_He spun and saw the light at last, three figures silhouetted in front of it. The Dread Doctors. One reached toward him, hand slipping below the water to grasp his shoulder, to hold him under._

His hand shot out in a flash, closing around a wrist with bruising force. Theo snarled and made to lunge, but his head swam, vision black. His strength flooded out of him all at once, leaving him slumping back against the wheel of the car. Something caught his shoulder and pulled him upright.

“Down,” Theo mumbled. “Need to lie down, the blood...” The blood wasn’t getting to his head.

His head felt like it was filled with fluff, but Theo had just enough presence of mind to realize that he was being awkwardly shifted around, a forearm against the side of his neck, a knee pressing to his shoulder to shift him sideways. He waited until he was flat on the ground, pulse starting to level out, before he blinked his eyes open. His vision was blurred for a few moments, but the image slowly coalesced into the face of Stiles Stilinski, dim in the dying light of the fire.

Stiles knelt beside him, his bandaged hands cradled awkwardly in his lap. “You weren’t sick in the hotel,” he observed.

“Nope,” Theo agreed. The torture had sucked, but not feeling like this had been nice, at least.

“Malia told me a little,” he explained.

“I’m sure she did.” Theo couldn’t have felt any more pathetic if he tried. Powerless at the hands of Stiles fucking Stilinski. “What do you want?”

Stiles glanced over his shoulder. “Peter and I are sleeping in the back of the pickup truck,” he said. “I was just coming to say you can sleep in the back of my car, if you want.”

Theo glared up at him. “What if I steal it and disappear into the night?”

Stiles tipped his head to the side, squinting at him. “I don’t really think you should be driving,” he pointed out, not sounding very concerned.

Letting out a slow breath, Theo nodded. “That’s fair,” he agreed.

“Can you get up to get over there?” Stiles asked. “I’d offer you a hand, but...” He held up his useless hands with a sort of helpless expression. They still reeked of burnt flesh.

“I can get there,” Theo said. “I just need a few minutes.”

He expected Stiles to leave then, but instead he shifted off his knees to sit cross-legged. He looked perfectly content to sit there and wait, which made zero sense. Theo _knew_ he had Peter, the new-old love interest, waiting for him. His first instinct was to make a jab about it, but then he remembered what Malia said about not being a dick.

Instead, he found himself asking, “So are you going back to Beacon Hills with the rest of them?”

“Yeah,” Stiles agreed. “For a little while. Apparently Braeden used her connections in the Marshals to spin a story about us being kidnapped by a suspect I was after. That should get me some time off. I think everyone else is going to stick around for a little bit longer, too. It’d be nice if we could all get together without almost dying one of these days, but...” He laughed. “I guess it is what it is.”

Theo glanced in the direction of the pickup truck, though he couldn’t see very well while lying down. “After that, you’ll all scoot back to your corners of the world?”

“Probably.” Stiles kept shifting his hands around like he was about to fidget, then remembered he couldn’t. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll put in for a transfer. See if I can get something closer to home.”

“Closer to Peter,” Theo supposed, not really sure why he cared. Maybe because playing matchmaker to those two was the only decent thing he’d managed to do while they were in that stupid hotel.

Stiles smiled, then looked away. “You think you can get up?” he asked again.

Theo sat slowly, wary for any sign of dizziness. He managed to get to his feet without incident, though. Stiles offered an elbow and walked him to the rental car.

“Sorry, it’ll probably be cramped,” Stiles said.

“It’s fine,” Theo assured him quickly. He had fully expected to sleep on the dirt. “Thanks.”

Stiles made an abortive move toward his jacket pocket, then laughed and turned so Theo could reach into it himself. “Keys,” he offered. As soon as Theo had retrieved them, Stiles stepped back. He paused. He stepped closer again. “Hey, I know I barely know you and you’re kind of fucked up,” he said, “but please don’t steal my car? You wait around ‘til morning, one of us will drive you to Beacon Hills.”

“Where you’re gonna help me,” Theo said, still skeptical. Hell, maybe this was all just some plot to lure him back with them so they could lock him up. Stick him in Eichen House, maybe.

Stiles smirked and stepped back again. “It’s what we do,” he said. With that, he turned and walked away in the direction of the pickup truck.

The fire was almost out, leaving them in nothing but the light of the moon and a dim glow of coals. Chris and Isaac had set up a tent, but the rest had curled up in their cars. What a bunch of do-good idiots, welcoming someone like him along with them, knowing what he was and what he’d done.

Well, Theo thought as he slid into the back of Stiles’s car, if they wanted to be a bunch of idiots, that was on them. He might as well take advantage of their naivety, get himself fixed up. If it was a trap, so what? His last plan had been a trap, too. And if it wasn’t…

Theo pulled the door shut behind him and curled up on the seat. As he drifted to sleep again, a new image unfurled in his mind.

_It was a big house, way out in the woods, thrumming with energy. Everywhere he looked, he saw members of the McCall pack. Sitting on the porch swing. Chopping wood. Someone bent under the hood of a car in the driveway. A group was out in the trees, chasing one another around while loud hoots and hollers echoed through the air._

_The front door opened. Scott stood there, holding the knob. “Come on in,” he said._

“ _We’ve been expecting you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been a weird experiment of a story for me, but I've had a lot of fun writing it. Thanks for everyone that followed along with me! If you're just reading it now, please make my day and drop me a comment below!

**Author's Note:**

> I love it when people comment along, so please don't feel shy! Also, come visit me on [tumblr](https://luulapants.tumblr.com/).


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